Police red-faced after tomatoes raid

An informer was left looking a little dopey after tipping off police to cannabis plants growing outside a maisonette in the Black Country.

When officers swooped on the address in Wolverhampton all they found was a prize crop of tomatoes.

Police apologised to 50-year-old George Clark-Roden after realising the tip-off had been a mistake. Mr Clark-Roden explained today: "I answered a knock at the door to find a uniformed officer taking a look at the growth of flowers and shrubs outside my maisonette."

"He said: 'Do all these plants belong to you?' I admitted that they did and noticed that he seemed to be paying particular attention to the tomatoes in pots by the front door.

"I asked him if he thought they were dope plants and he looked at me before confessing: 'Well, we have had a complaint.'

"Luckily I had the perfect alibi because I was able to point out the ten tomatoes growing on the three plants in question.

"The policeman then asked to look around my home which I was happy to show him. Presumably he wanted to make sure I was not cultivating cannabis anywhere else. When he had satisfied himself that the place was clean of drugs, he apologised and we both had a good laugh about it."

Mr Clark-Roden, an audio-visual artist from Upper Street, Tettenhall, landed in trouble after the seedlings given to him by girlfriend Sandra Meaney grew into three-feet high plants. They got too big for his studio and so he put them outside the front door in the glass-fronted communal foyer of the maisonette block, which acted like a greenhouse and made them grow even higher.

He added: "Unfortunately they were visible to anybody walking past and obviously somebody has gone by with a very fertile imagination. But no harm was done and I have got a great story to tell down the pub."

West Midlands Police spokeswoman Jaspreet Jagdev said: "Police visited an address in Upper Street following reports of an odour of cannabis coming from a property but found nothing amiss."