A rose, in any other place…

When Dollard des Ormeaux resident Abbas Syed took a look at his front yard last Saturday morning, an unusual sight greeted him.

"There, do you see? It's right here," he told The Chronicle a few days later, pointing to the strange rose stem which had developed a second flower growing out of where there would normally be a leaf.

"I called MacDonald Campus," explained Syed. "I came here in 1986," he said. "I bought the house, it was there," he added, but this had never happened before.

Since its discovery, the rose has caused some excitement in Syed's block. "I showed my neighbour," he said, pointing to a house across the street.

His wife thought the unusual occurrence intriguing as well. Even Syed's son, who normally does not really care for the plants around their house, took note of the flower.

Over at McGill University's MacDonald Campus in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, however, horticulturalist Dr. Danielle Donnelly said roses do tend to exhibit strange behaviour.

"It always looks amazing and wonderful," she said, but she has heard of this happening before.

In fact, MacDonald Campus has become so swamped with calls about unusual occurrences before that they opened a dedicated telephone line to handle peoples' concerns, the Urban Nature Information service, which is open summer-long.

"It's amazing how many people call us to report what they are seeing," she said.

"In the vegetable world, there is a relationship between leaves and petals," she said.

Though Syed had originally contacted MacDonald Campus thinking that they would perhaps like to pick up the rose plant from his front yard, Donnelly said the occurrence was not really rare enough to justify it.

Roses are one of the two most frequent causes for people to call the campus' hotline in the summer, Donnelly said, with the other being 'twin trees,' which look like two different treetops jutting out of the same trunk and have usually gotten that way because of grafting.