Worst of all, this past spring a British couple were robbed of their entire garden. You expect people to take ornaments and plants but not a pond, Linda Warburton said. I cemented lots of the ornaments down, but they just took the patio slabs as well. Homeowners insurance policies often cover the loss of trees and plants up to certain limits, but most thievery takes place on a smaller scale a plucked blossom here, a slip nipped off there, a handful of seeds. Staff at the Devonian Botanic Garden in Edmonton are still smarting over an incident several years ago when they apprehended a visitor smuggling specimens out in a knapsack.
Plants are most at risk in the unguarded outdoors, where no one is watching.
Wildcrafting, the gathering of plants from their natural habitat, has increased along with the popularity of herbal products, and so has poaching. Unethical foragers have depleted already dwindling colonies of endangered goldenseal and American ginseng in Quebec and Ontario, and in the U.S. even common species such as purple coneflower are under siege. They re embedding tiny transponders, about the size of a grain of rice, in the park s valuable cactus and yucca plants, and enlisting global positioning system technology to track the coded tags in hopes of catching greenery thieves red-handed. All rights reserved.