A local woman is losing her battle to save a patch of poppies along a SkyTrain trail on Rumble Street, close to Gilley Avenue.
In 2010, Olive Balabanov lobbied for TransLinkhired maintenance crews to stop mowing down the poppies, but this past year a tall grass has choked the flowers out.
"Many small poppies were growing amongst the grass, unable to compete with the fast growing grass," Balabanov said.
Throughout summer, Balabanov watched the poppies struggle.
"The poppies were straggly and far less in number than last year, while the grass thrived and turned out to be a type of wheat maturing into seeds and covering the area with dead stalks," she said.
Balabanov is not sure where the tall grass came from and said it is only growing in the poppy patch. Now, only a few flowers are left standing.
"It's clear to me that the grass was planted to choke the poppies out," Balabanov said.
"Will any poppies survive?"
TransLink hired Trevor Jarvis Contracting to tend the area.
Trevor Jarvis told the NOW that his company did not plant any grass among the poppies.
"We never made a conscious effort to choke them out," he said. "We were cooperating with her, and we never cut them down."
But, his company doesn't take care of them either, he added, and the area would have to be weeded by hand to save the flowers.
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