A strange plant/weed that grew amazingly well despite being choked by the plantain tree

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(Edited)

In as much as cities are well maintained and developed, I honestly believe it lacks a perfect nature's view. The city that I live in might be different from other cities, but I have come to realize that It's so difficult to find plantations. In fact, farms, or let me just say gardens with green plants and trees are among the things I have long seen. Due to this fact, I anticipated taking pictures of the ones I came across when I visited Delta state. S/o to @justinpencilz for taking me around the gardens he visits daily.

Visit to a Garden

One beautiful afternoon, I was taken to a fish pond where I found several types of plants around the pond. I wasted no time but to start capturing the eye-catching ones. No doubt, the space is meant for just fish ponds so, it was filled with little useful plants and plenty of weeds. Nevertheless, I sighted a weed growing in between a plantation of plantain. As you can see below, it grew right from the bottom and then spread around its branches while fighting for space with the plantain tree.


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Not just the Fight for space that caught my attention but the different variants of leaves of the weed did. As seen above, you can't really tell much about the variants but you'd notice that it has old or matured leaves that are deep green and a couple fresh ones that are lighter in color.

Stepping an inch closer, I began to doubt if this plant is truly a weed or if it was intentionally left there to grow for future use? Well, since I have no idea, I continued to assume it was a weed.
I love how beautiful its life cycle is. Similar to the lifecycle of other living things, the older leaves aren't eye-catching when compared to the newer ones. The old leaves are deep green and dirty with a few holes created by insects, I believe. The new leaves are neater and lighter in color with no spot at all. Compare the two variants below.

Old set of leaves

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New set of leaves

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At this point, I was baffled by how neat the new leaves were. looking at the old ones, you could tell either birds or insects turned the surface to their playground. But does this mean that predators prefer older leaves? Definitely not! because I had a couple of times seen birds plucking fresher flowers.

After a short time, I noticed that the new set of leaves displayed above isn’t the starting stage of the lifecycle of this plant. I was shocked to see another variant located at another branch. See the image below.

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At first, I thought it was its seed but taking a closer look at it, I found it's almost the first stage of its lifecycle. I concluded that the brownish leaves above will grow to become the first-two leaves displayed in the image below.

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I wasn't only surprised by the different lifecycle stages but by how it could produce its beautiful leaves despite being choked by the plantain trees.

I'd have loved to see what the foundation looked like but I didn't get the chance to capture the stem.
A few meters away from the plantain zone, I noticed a similar weed.

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This one wasn't big despite standing alone. If I was asked what could be the reason? I'd say;

  • How big a plant grows depends on the species of the plant
  • Growth of a plant depends on the soil it grew on
  • Some plants need a taller plant/pole to grow on (yam for example)

If the last picture of weed in this blog is the same as others, then, any of the conditions stated above would be why it hadn't grown well.

Kindly forgive me if I didn't state the names of the plants because I don't know them. I generalized them as weeds.
All pictures were taken by me



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