Herbert Grossman and his wife have been going on walks at Brookside Gardens since they moved to Wheaton in 1970. Often these walks include a stroll through the gardens’ conservatory, a glass greenhouse that provides guests the opportunity to enjoy tropical plants that aren’t native to the area.
Recently though, the conservatory’s plants have fewer fruits for visitors such as the Grossmans to enjoy. Brookside Gardens reported via its Facebook page Tuesday morning that someone or some people have been ripping fruits off the papaya and cacao trees.
“It’s par for the course,” said a disappointed Grossman after the damage was pointed out to him recently. “It’s the one good thing on this side of the county, everything good usually goes to Rockville and Potomac.”
The Facebook post, which spawned more than 50 comments and nearly 650 reactions of frustration, stated the removal of the fruits make the trees less enjoyable to look at — and in the case of the cacao tree, where the buds grow directly on the trunk and branches, the tree can become more susceptible to disease and death.
“Instead of even cutting it, they’re just tearing them right off the bark,” Conservatory Director Raymond Carter told Bethesda Today, “and that’s destroying the tissue and leaves it wounded with those big gashes in the tree.”
The plants are used in the various classes Brookside offers for all ages to show people how plants develop and what they look like on the inside. The incident has sparked discussion about adding cameras in the conservatory, according to Carter.
Carter noted the papaya fruits are being taken long before they are ripe or edible, a process which takes up to a year. There is only one of each tree in the conservatory; at least five papayas have been taken.
“Not that we would want people to steal stuff at any point in time, but the fact that they are being stolen with absolutely no useful purpose [is] kind of sad,” Carter said.
He recalled he once saw a man taking pods off the cacao trees, and when he confronted him, the man’s justification was that he’s a taxpayer and Brookside Gardens is publicly funded.
“I was like, ‘Well, where to next then? The library to rip pages out of books?’,” Carter said. “That doesn’t make sense. These resources aren’t just for you.”
