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machado: plant-stealing, or 'proplifting', sounds absurd, but it's a thing
stealing plants or pieces of them from stores or other people's gardens may not sound like a big deal, but it's actually larceny. botanical larceny.
aug 1 2023
6 minute read
taking cuttings of greenery sounds a bit less smarmy than hoisting an entire plant or tree out of someone's garden, but it's actually a big deal in the eyes of the law. getty
someone is stealing plants out of gardens and off of porches in my neighbourhood, and well, there’s nothing like a little rage to set off a facebook frenzy.
thirty comments later, the extent of plant pillaging became clearer with stories of herbs in a front yard being cut neatly with the thieves caught on camera; a four-foot hibiscus tree that “disappeared”; and a treasured four-year-old bush that someone chopped up and deposited in the property owner’s own garden waste bag.
strangers swiping plants and trees out of other people’s gardens is not a new thing. in fact, plant-stealing is quite prolific and has been happening for years. in 2014, cbc radio interviewed two listeners who woke up to empty holes in their garden beds. just last month, barrie, ont. police officers responded to a call about two $140 planters that were taken from a resident’s porch. two days later, they were back to investigate the huge hole left after 20 irish flowers vanished from another garden. and the city of oshawa recently installed signs in its parks to remind people that removing plants — or parts of plants — from public parks is illegal.
it reminds me of my aunt, an avid gardener, who, though she never outright uprooted someone else’s plant or tree — to my knowledge, anyway — would stealthily pinch off a cutting from some kind of flora that she hadn’t seen before and stuff it into her purse. it didn’t matter if it was in someone’s garden, part of the vegetation at the side of a highway or buried in the “exotic species” section of a botanical sanctuary — if it was unique, a piece of it was coming home with her so she could try to grow it. it drove my uncle crazy, particularly if the trip back home crossed paths with customs.
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“you are going to get arrested one day,” he’d plead, only to be that guy with beads of perspiration on his forehead shaking his head when the scary no-b. s. security officer asked if they had any plants to declare as my aunt smiled innocently behind him.
proplifting: a mix of shoplifting and propagate
and while taking cuttings of greenery sounds a bit less smarmy than hoisting an entire plant or tree out of someone’s garden or trimming herbage and leaving the rest to wilt and die, it’s actually a big deal in the eyes of the law — larceny to be exact (who knew?) there’s even a trendy name for it: proplifting, a combination of the words shoplifting and propagate — the art of taking the leaves or stems of plants with the goal of rooting and growing them. the term originally stems from a trend from a few years ago in the garden centres of big box stores like home depot and lowes, where people would pick up plant droppings from the floor and take them home to grow as a way of inexpensively adding to their plant collection. more recently, proplifting has expanded to include the more active snipping and clipping of plants, either those for sale or in a private garden.
proplifting is such a thing, in fact, that there is a subreddit forum with more than 200,000 members who share their latest and greatest proplifting find and chronicle its growth — or demise — with pictures and enthusiastic captions. and though there are ethics listed on the page — particularly a rule against stealing — users do post about cuttings obtained from neighbourhood gardens, stores and parks.
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certainly, plant-stealing, whether you take the whole thing, roots and all, or just a leaf or two, has negative implications. there’s the dude sadly missing his hibiscus tree, of course. but in terms of snipping pieces off of a plant, consider the damage being done to what’s left — if the plant is being sold in a store, for example, missing leaves or stems might make it unsellable. in conservatories and botanical gardens, you could essentially be killing rare and extinct species. and when it comes to taking cuttings over borders, there’s the risk of also transporting dangerous bacteria and insects that could threaten not only the vegetation in your home country, but also livestock and the economy, according to the government of canada.
but putting aside legal and plant-wellness ramifications for a moment, what is at the root of plant theft?
plant theft can be the result of a true love of horticulture
if you are like my aunt, you are feeding a genuine love and interest in horticulture and simply want to grow your collection of green exoticness. those with more sinister motivations steal plants or cuttings with the intention of making a little green by selling what they sow — a trend that has prompted one vancouver nursery owner to microchip some of her more valuable plants. and then there are those who don’t set out to walk away with a piece of a plant in their purse or pocket, but are seized with an urge to pluck that they can’t resist, either because of beauty (say, a stunning sunflower) or simply, need (a sprig of basil for that night’s pasta dinner). and what about the people who make up the bushy membership of the proplifting subreddit forum? the ones who excitedly post about their latest “props”?
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perhaps there’s something more to the absurdity of plant theft. after all, what makes someone arm themselves with a shovel or scissors, plant themselves in someone’s garden — front garden! — in view of cameras and nosy neighbours and take what’s clearly not theirs?
certainly there is a degree of thrill that comes with the potential of getting caught. terrence shulman, a therapist and founder of the shulman center for compulsive stealing, spending and hoarding, told abc news that stealing provides some people with “a rush of naughtiness.”
but maybe — similar to running off with hotel slippers and taking handfuls of restaurant after-dinner candies, activities that shulman refers to as “grey area behaviours” — there’s also a sense that a clipped stem of an herb or a couple of daisies (roots included) won’t be missed, or is not that big of a deal. or worse, that the property owners, living in a fairly comfortable neighbourhood, can afford to lose a petal or two. still doesn’t matter, though, ariel kaminer, who used to write an ethics advice column for the new york times, also told abc news: taking something that’s not yours is stealing.
plant pilfering is a slippery slope
those being pilfered agree, saying that no matter how meaningless you think it is, the practice of stealing plants is hurtful, “atrocious” as one facebook user put it, and leads to no good.
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“taking a succulent leaf from the ground of a home depot floor isn’t hurting anybody, but that’s just one step away from just taking a cutting,” georgia wilson, who runs the instagram account plants.n.things, told the guardian. “and that’s just one step away from, ‘oh, i’m at this botanical garden, i’ll just take a cutting of this.’ it’s a really slippery slope.”
whether or not botanical larceny puts you on the fast track to grand larceny, it’s not clear. for now, the garden owners in my neck of the woods are taking to social media to figure out strategies to keep their plants grounded, installing security cameras, moving planters closer to their houses and making the difficult choice to not plant anything at all. a quick online search reveals another popular choice to keep thieves out of gardens: angry messages.
sign on a #leslieville #toronto front yard. pic.twitter.com/rps9riniad
— jim rankin (@jleerankin) june 14, 2014
for sure, it’s easy to understand the rage. and though, as one of my neighbours pointed out in the above facebook post, there are bigger fish to fry these days when it comes to the illegal activities in this city — endless shootings, for one — it doesn’t soften the blow of having the privacy of your property invaded, and the lovely green things that are planted for our collective enjoyment stolen or damaged. or the heartfelt disappointment that, in a world in which very little is within our control, we can’t even protect the things that grow in our very own gardens.
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lisa machado is the executive producer of healthing.
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