Something strange popped up a few weeks ago in the flower baskets along Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill.

In five or six of the 80 flower baskets that line Chestnut Hill’s upscale business district, small but thriving young marijuana plants were discovered, somewhere between the petunias, the impatiens and the sweet-potato vines.

“I did the right thing,” said Bob Markowski, the landscaper in charge of keeping the planters watered and weeded. “I got rid of them. They’re in the dump.”

How the marijuana got there is not known. But the most likely scenario is that someone put a few marijuana seeds in the planters one day or night last spring, when volunteers for various garden clubs were filling the baskets with the official mix of plants.

“My take is that somebody was playing a joke,” said John Levitties, the antiques dealer who heads the Chestnut Hill District, set up three years ago to maintain the business community’s streets and streetscape.

A letter-writer sent word of the unusual crop to the Daily News, along with some hard-to-make-out photos of the flower baskets that seemed to show the jagged edges of America’s favorite, albeit illegal, weed.

Several reporters volunteered to investigate, but it was too late: The evidence had vanished.

“It was a setup,” said Markowski. “Someone was trying to embarrass us. It probably got planted by the same person who sent the letter… Chestnut Hill’s a funny place.”

Levitties, owner of the John Alexander antique gallery, said he was not aware of any rivalries that would explain the pot plants.

“I just think it was somebody’s idea of a joke,” Levitties said. He said he doubted that the discovery had been reported to police.

Calls to the 14th Police District in Germantown were not returned.

Russell Goudy Sr., longtime proprietor of the Kilian Hardware Co., at Germantown and Highland avenues, said he hadn’t heard about the plants, but wasn’t surprised. “It sounds like a good place to plant them,” he said. “Not where you’d normally look.”