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Daylight shrubbery
Joe Shute on the recent rise in horticultural heists
Hang on to your hollyhocks! Padlock your pampas grass! Not only has lockdown turned us into a nation of gardeners, it’s seen a spate of horticultural heists, too. Joe Shute examines the roots of an unlikely crime wave. Illustrations by R Fresson
It was the most brazen of crimes. One evening last November, a white SUV pulled up on Stockport Road in the affluent Manchester suburb of Altrincham. A woman climbed out, presumably carrying a large pair of secateurs, and committed an astonishingly public act of theft, before making a quick getaway.
Appeals were launched; witness statements taken. One trader at Altrincham Market reported seeing the mystery woman in the act, but so far she remains at large. Sarah Walmsley, the victim of the theft, is furious. ‘I was hoping that the person responsible might have heard about it, felt really guilty and dropped us some cash or something,’ she says. ‘I am livid, absolutely livid.’
Her unlikely loot? A large bush of pampas grass.
Walmsley, 50, chair of the local voluntary group Altrincham in Bloom, had planted the pampas grass to obscure an unsightly electrical substation, and all but one of the fronds were chopped off. She suspects they have been sold on for a profit.
Once associated with 1970s swinger parties, the tall, feathery plant has had something of a modern interior-design revival. It is now highly sought after – and highly Instagrammable – selling for as much as £12 a stem. Walmsley estimates that those taken in the heist could have fetched in the region of £250.
Walmsley declares the pampas theft to be the boldest in the committee’s seven-year history – but it’s not the only one. Members of Altrincham in Bloom, who have previously won gold in the ‘North West in Bloom’ contest and silver gilt in the national competition, reel off a list of stolen plants: a washingtonia palm, acers, bedding plants, as well as calla lilies, which have been stolen three times from a town-centre planter. Collectively they are worth thousands of pounds.
Many such acts of plant-napping have been reported up and down the country in the past year. No official figures exist (plenty go unreported, except on local gardening websites and forums), but it is surely no coincidence that the spate of horticultural thefts coincides with the pandemic, which has turned us into a nation of gardeners.
Figures released at the end of last summer suggested that Britons had spent £3.7 billion on gardening products since the start of the first lockdown, with outdoor plants top of the list. And criminals have been capitalising on the rising demand. Many thieves are not picky: everything from freshly rolled turf, to fruit trees in pots, to garden gnomes has vanished.
Over the past year, garden centres, councils and community groups have all reported horticultural thefts. Rosemary bushes were plucked from a municipal planter in Bermondsey, south London; yucca plants have been swiped from outside a house in north London’s Stoke Newington; there have been yet more pampas grasses nabbed, this time from Sandhaven Beach, forcing South Tyneside Council to issue a plea for people to stop taking them; and even £2 bedding plants were pilfered from a family garden in Nottingham, with the offender caught red-handed on CCTV pulling up on his bike and stuffing them into a shopping bag.
Last summer there was a spate of garden thefts around villages in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, with eight different incidents reported over three weeks.
Naomi Wilmot, 57, a teaching assistant, was one of the targets. Two of the seven gnomes she kept in her front garden, next to a figurine of Snow White, were stolen. ‘You do feel as if somebody has invaded your space,’ she says. ‘They were heavy concrete and not easy to walk off with. And what use are two of the seven dwarfs to anybody if I’ve got the other five?’
‘So many people have discovered the benefits of gardening this year and it is such a shame to take advantage of that,’ says Alan Titchmarsh, the gardening writer and broadcaster. ‘Particularly when you have cultivated something and cherished it, they are like your babies. It is heartbreaking when someone takes away not
‘It is heartbreaking when someone takes away not just your plant but also the time and effort in growing it’
just your plant but also the time and effort in growing it.’
But it’s not just petty theft. Last summer there were three separate break-ins at the Honnor and Jeffrey Afton Garden Centre on the Isle of Wight. Thieves made off with 100 bags of Levington compost, palm trees, olive trees and some high-end stoneware pots worth between £30 and £40 each. They also stole a large stoneware sheep. The loot totalled around £3,000.
‘It was particularly disappointing because, at the time it happened, everybody was banding together [to get through the pandemic],’ says Patrick Milsom, 36, who works at the garden centre. ‘It was upsetting someone could take advantage of that sort of situation.’
Plant-napping can be divided into three categories: raids such as those on the garden centre; collectors targeting rare plants or organised criminal gangs stealing them to order; and everyday opportunist theft, with someone simply taking something that catches their eye. This third category has been particularly prevalent since the first lockdown began.
Dr Carly Cowell, senior science officer at Kew Gardens, says many otherwise right-thinking people tell themselves that it’s OK to pocket a flower or take a cutting of a plant from someone’s garden. ‘Some people just don’t see it as theft,’ she says. ‘Plants are around us so people have this idea that there are plenty more and it’s fine.’
But Cowell regards it as a moral crime at the very least. ‘If you take a cutting, you can open a wound, which the plant if it’s susceptible could actually die from.’
Officially, the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 makes it illegal to uproot any wild plant without permission from the landowner or occupier. However picking wild flowers on public land is generally permitted in the
UK as long as it is for non-commercial purposes, and provided they’re not growing in a designated conservation area. The exceptions to this are 185 protected species, including orchids, mosses and lichens, which are illegal to pick or uproot without a licence, regardless of where they grow.
Kew Gardens is a particular target for plant-nappers. The popular Royal Botanic Gardens in south-west London, home to more than 50,000 plants, has had its own police force for 175 years. However, security was ramped up further in 2014, following the theft of a Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest water lily on earth. Kew botanists had painstakingly raised a small number of the plants, extinct in the wild, from seed before someone snuck into a conservatory and took one from a shallow pond. ‘You can’t put a value on something going extinct,’ says Cowell. ‘To me it was priceless.’
Today Kew remains staffed by former police officers and ex-soldiers, but a CCTV network also monitors the site and all staff have received training to spot anything untoward.
Cowell estimates the value of illegally traded flora to be anywhere between $10 billion and $20 billion a year (although the bulk of this is made up of the black market in timber). Much of the illicit trade occurs on social media and internet auction sites, according to a recently published report by the University of Southampton in partnership with Kew Gardens and the UK Border Force. Orchids and cacti are among the most widely trafficked plants worldwide, with much demand from China’s rapidly growing middle class. The report found that 109 threatened cacti species were recorded for sale on 11 internet auction sites in 2017. And between April 2018 and March 2019, the UK Border Force CITES Team (responsible for protecting endangered species including rare plants) seized a total of 68 live plants. Of these, 90 per cent were orchids. While endangered species can only be