Sorry for your loss Gralfus. I haven't had it happen so far, but I've been sort of waiting to see if it happens to us. Our mailbox is at the end of a long driveway and can't be seen from the house. We recently put two pots of geraniums down there. We've had things stolen from our mailbox, so I wouldn't be surprised if the geraniums go too. But somehow, I expect gardeners to be good people. LOL We're above that!!

Molly~

That's terrible!! I'd like to see someone dare enter my backyard. One word, Rottweilers. My dogs, although not vicious, would scare the tar out of any stranger. Motion sprinklers would do really well if it happens again.

Poppies torn out by hooligans was bad enough. Much worse was finding a tidy hole where my globe thistle had been. Talk about gall...this happened in the night, well back from the road, and the plant was taken quite carefully, almost certainly by a gardener with a flashlight.

I had oriental lilies stolen in my green street garden, a volunteer garden to improve public spaces. I was pretty pissed off but that was the only thing that was ever stolen... But in a more positive light, I had neighbours come and collect seed pods (love in a mist, poppies, jewel weeds, etc) to sow in their own gardens. Quite lovely to see the street lined up with wildflowers.

When I lived in a condo, I did some of the building planting. I naively planted a couple of hostas on the shady side of the building (where a lot of people park due to the public building across the street). Went to water them one day, but all that was there were two holes!

I also planted annuals in the beds that flank the entry doors. Again, went to tend them and there were about 4 or 5 holes where there were once plants. At least they left most, but sheesh. Some armeria (thrift) also went missing, but I think the person who mowed thought it was a clump of grass so took it out. And some tools that I forgot outside of course disappeared.

I've heard of people (& commercial areas) having whole hanging baskets and precious perennials stolen - pretty sad.

A recent Portland newscast stated that flowers were being removed from city parks and being sold at corner bouquet stands.

There is a long thread going on in the Antique Rose forum regarding this. Apparently, in many cases plants, tools and garden decorations are often sold locally at flea markets, etc. Others were stolen (in one case finally caught on camera)to be planted in another yard. Amazing how disgusting and completely without decency folks can be when their self interest is involved, isn't it?

We had a tree form red-flowering currant stolen from a school garden. It was so upsetting because it was a garden designed and planted by the kids.

So far (and I'm knocking furiously on wood) I haven't had anything taken from my home garden.

On the justice-was-served side, a friend of mine told me that when the bus stopped to pick him up at his house (he's wheelchair bound), the driver helped herself to some euphorbia from my friend's wife's front garden. Jeff figured Karma would get the driver. Sure enough, the driver complained of a really nasty rash the next day. Served her right!

No plants, but I did have a bird bath stolen from my front yard. It was maybe 5 feet from the house and in a spotlighted area which is very visible from the street also, so whoever took it knew no fear. I haven't put much effort into my front yard for that very reason. You wouldn't know I am a gardner unless you could see into my back yard. I don't want to put a lot of time and effort into making it look great, just to have someone else come along and steal it. And thankfully the backyard is surrounded by a 6 foot privacy fence that we keep padlocked.

Fiwa

If you didn't live in B'ham, Mearth, I would think we have the same thief!

I had two lewsias stolen from my front garden April of last year. One of the lewsias had been carefully removed, the hole smoothed over, the other ripped out, leaving a gaping hole. Makes me wonder if the thief was interrupted or scared off. One year later, still makes mad/sad!

Too bad lewisias don't cause a rash, Lisa! But maybe some karmic justice happened anyway!

I don't understand what makes people do this kind of thing!

My neighbors in NY had an old and expensive 3 or 4 foot Japanese laceleaf maple stolen right out of the ground from their front yard, which was on a busy-ish street. They replaced it with another expensive small tree - which was promptly stolen.

My yard service used to "steal" all my perennials - if it wasn't blooming, they were convinced it was a weed and pulled it!

I caught some teens picking daffodils once, in their favor was that I had planted them to naturalize. I explained that, no these weren't wildflowers; it stopped.

There was a story on the news in seattle the other day about people stealing plants.

I keep my front yard pretty simple with very little to tempt a thief or a "picker". Not to say my backyard is inaccessible, but there's less chance of plants being stolen if they can't be seen. It's a shame our "civilized" society contains so many thieves.

Patrick

I live in the Greater Seattle area and one of the nurseries I go to has large quantities of bamboo. Some of them are in the ground in groves and a few are pretty exotic. One morning they found evidence of substantial digging attempts in one of the groves, but the thieves, although they knew what they wanted, had no experience digging bamboo, which requires a lot of muscle and skill. Final score: Thieves - 0; plants -1...

ah! how fortuitous, i can now tell my story from last tuesday! here goes..

so i live right next door to a coffee shop and had set a nice blue pot under my stairway to pot up the next day (it had a chip in it, but still quite nice) as well as some succulents so they could soak up the sun.

the next day i came out and they were missing so i started pitching a cussin' fit on the sidewalk when my friend who works at the coffee shop walked by...he asked what was wrong so i let him know and he started commiserating with me but then suddenly asked if one of my succulents had red leaves...

turns out the guy who provides the plants and looks after them for store credit at the coffee shop had stashed them in the back alley of the place and my friend had seen him do so! he went and rescued them for me and i went in the shop the next day and had the theiving fellow fired...

moral: it helps to raise a ruckus!

-ming

I've had my poppies ripped off twice. The first time by a guy that stopped and asked if he could have the stalks with the beautiful seedheads. I let him cut about 3/4's of what I had and told him the rest were my seed stock for the following year. He left and I did too, and when I got home later every last poppy in the garden was gone. Fortunately I had shared seed with many many friends over the years and got it plenty back again. The second time was during Lakefair, a local festival. All the poppies in the front yard were taken over two nights.

Last spring someone cut all the stalks off a clump of irises and took the flowers. That was really infuriating. I could care less if someone wants to gather a few seeds from something, or even to beg a start (I'm happy to oblige) - but stealing is the worst.

Mike

Two years ago on Mothers' Day, we had several gerber daisies dug up out of our front treelawn. I always figured it was some thief's mom's gift and felt sorry for her.

Then last year we were mid-way through a landscaping project and had a half flat of mixed plants stolen from our front porch (up the driveway and off to the side--not really visable from the street). It was a particular assortment--some small red/brown phormiums, some salvia (sp? blue spikey flowers) and some small green creepy things. About two months later, I noticed the exact same assortment growing in a yard a few blocks away--a yard in which the only other plants were old and overgrown roses.

I haven't had the nerve to go and knock on the door. I figure they could have bought them from someone who said they were extras from a job site or something (door-to-door informal sales are not totally uncommon in my neighborhood--although it's generally "hot" items).

Poppies saved over as seeds in this area are often opium poppies. The back yard is a better place for these, esp. since they are illegal.

Sadly, I've seen this type of thread for the last few years on gardenweb. It appears to be happening all over the country. Like several have already mentioned, I keep the front yard unspectacular. The flowers I grow there are quite common.

Mary

maryinpnw---I do the same thing. My front yard looks very plain. Now my back yard is another story.

May be it is time to keep the plants under glass cage
with a lock. With a down economy, these kind of activities
are bound to happen.

-lg

A friend of mine had a yard "ornament" stolen years ago. It was a larger than life size PURPLE COW!!!! It was kinda heavy but made of fiberglass or they'd never have been able to move it. Even though the town she lived was pop. 10,000, she never saw it anywhere again. A purple cow for heaven's sake.

I never put out expensive or particularly pretty things in the front. Too much sidewalk all right along the yard.

My neighbor had a branch ripped off her young tree. I heard a bunch of shrieking and yelling (kids) and looked outside just in time to see a teenager rip a branch off her tree (she really had to work at it) and chase someone with it and then drop it. I wanted to go b#tch her out, but decided I didn't want her resulting anger directed at my yard.

Another time, DH and I built a rock retaining wall along the sidewalk. A few weeks later, we came out to get in the car only to find that some idiot had chucked some of the rocks across the sidewalk to our parking strip lawn. Fortunately for us the vandal discovered that the rocks look small but are a LOT of work to move around. He got tired after about 7 of them. I can only hope he smashed his fingers a time or two.

What happened to people keeping their hands to themselves and off the property of others?

Never had a plant stolen, but once at a house we were renting had a $5.oo shovel stolen! I couldn't believe it. Someone stole our windshield wipers off our car once too! Egads.

Just because of things like this I no longer buy plants from big trucks on the side of the road. I always wonder where the plants have come from.

The local rose society once had about half their roses for their annual rose sale stolen overnight... and they were particular theives. They picked through them getting the best varieties and leaving the others.

I just want to tell my story, just because I'm a bit sad about it. I moved to my new place almost six months ago, and I had to store the plants in pots at my parents' place until I get things organized, so I started moving them to the new place slowly. The new place has a central courtyard and walkways around that I can put pots on outside my apartment, as well as a patio in the back.

I had a lot of stuff to move, so one day I put the plants I just brought over beside my car in the garage. I figured, it's in a back corner by a brightly-lit back door, and they are just plants, mostly ones that didn't look all that impressive, since they are just returning from the winter, so they should be okay for a couple of days (I did this once before with no problems). I went out the next morning, checking on the plants on the way out, and they were there. When I went out again in the afternoon, they were all gone! They weren't plants that I needed for my arrangement necessarily, and there was nothing particularly special that I couldn't replace, but many of them were seedlings that I've been nursing for over a year, so that they could possibly flower next year, like irises that miraculously germinated despite the seeds being old, a vancouveria, the lone-surviving geranium from a batch that didn't quite make it, etc.

Now, what I don't understand is, why would anyone roam around a garage looking to steal plants in plastic temporary pots and a few clay pots that look piddly to begin with? I am sure most people wouldn't even be able to identify most of them from the state that they are in (four or five 8-in iris seedlings don't look like much other than weedy grass). I do hope that whoever ended up with them take care of them well, and they aren't ones I've figured into my patio garden anyway, but I would just like to know what in the world were they thinking?!? Are they stupid, plain malicious, or simply pathetic? They aren't worth anything to anyone (especially in our apartment building) except to the person who grew them and knew their history.

Sigh.

Sorry to hear of your loss. I had a garden center for 27 years and had a fellow from the neighborhood who would break in around Christmas time each year to steal Amaryllis (Hippeastrum). Finally when he was caught he was in the process of typing a manuscript for publication on Amaryllis. Later, after doing time for that and other crimes involving drugs he and his parents came to my store to shop like nothing ever happened.

Got up one Sunday am to see one of my driveway trees laying down, I figured the kids had knocked it down again. Nope, shovel marks all the way around, and someone had yanked on it for quite a while trying to get it out. Plant won, although is took a lot of TLC to keep it from dying. The nerve of thieves is unbelievable

Most people think what they are doing is justified, whatever it may be.

My entire garden is fenced and I have dogs (clearly posted on the gates) so fortunately - knock on wood - I have had nothing stolen from my garden, yet. OTOH, theft at my nursery is a huge problem. Streetside display beds have plants routinely ripped out - we actually saw one pickup stop, a gal jump out and rip out three blooming azaleas, toss 'em in the back and take off before we could raise an alarm. Amazingly, even with an alert staff, folks walk off with a bizarre assortment of stuff - a wooden garden bench (big!), a set of nesting tables from our gift shop, bronze foo dogs from our bonsai department (heavy!). It's just brazen! We have caught several shoplifters so far this season - most tend to be women in their 30's and 40's, otherwise well dressed and appearing well off. According to the county sheriff's office, this is the standard shoplifting profile, outpacing kids and teens by a wide margin.

Sleazy, cut-rate landscapers account for a portion of it too, particularly with plants. We keep our delivery gates locked even during the day to prevent them from driving right into our receiving area and loading up trees, shrubs and flats of freshly delivered perennials. They cut through a six foot chainlink fence topped with barbed wire at the back of our property to loadup with plants during the night. Now we have security cameras throughout the nursery and motion sensors and alarms in all the structures. It's a sad world when we all have to resort to such drastic measures just to protect our property and stay in business.

Isn't it interesting who is caught shoplifting? At my alma mater the biggest dorm theft problems were among the wealthy girls. My personal theory is that some people only value things that belong to someone else. Objects, animals, spouses - whatever. Perhaps if you can buy anything you want it no longer has the same value? I don't know.

Just last night someone stole a eucalyptus in a 15 gallon wooden planter pot. The planter fell apart as the thieves carried it off. We found it broken on the sidewalk this AM, minus the tree.

Last night 2 of my queen palms (on the right of the pic) were stolen from my back patio area of my apartment complex in DTLA. Pretty upsetting :(

Yes. Sadly we were the victims of the same type of theft. We live on a corner lot, have been here over 40yrs and with no fence. And every summer we would plant our flowers. Just trying to keep it nice, you know. Well, this summer, the summer summer of 2021, changed all that. We had two large round (bowl like) ceramic pots, filled with huge geraniums, smack dab in the middle of our side yard. One was is hot pink and the other was red. They got the red one ... had to have been a two demon job. cause I had just watered them and they were super heavy. So now we bring the one that's left, in at night and we sit it back out during the day. Looks like we gotta get that fence. (the pic is the one we still have.)