A group of Burnaby residents who just wanted to make their neighbourhood a bit nicer are feeling frustrated by plant thieves.
Thomas Hasek said his area around Victory and Jubilee in South Burnaby has seen thieves stealing lovely flowers.
“Some local gardening enthusiasts in our neighbourhood have converted their boulevards (city frontage property) into flower/shrub displays, and they are now losing some of their plants - most likely at night,” Hasek said. “The most recent happened last night on the southwest corner of Victory and Jubilee. It's pretty disheartening, and certainly needs to be discouraged. One local resident is making a police report, but we don't expect any help from that quarter.”
Hasek isn’t the only one to experience plant theft in recent months.
Lawyer Paul Doroshenko posted on Twitter that he witnessed two individuals digging up flowers from a planter bed outside his office.
“I heard some rustling outside the door. I looked out the window and this couple were stealing my flowers,” he wrote in his post, sharing a photo of a woman hunched over the flower bed while a man stood nearby.
And in May, CBC reported how one East Vancouver man witnessed a thief pull up in front of his home and rip his two-year-old Japanese maple out of the ground.
And Marilyn Baker was left feeling vulnerable after returning home only to find a large, empty hole where one of her euphorbias (an outdoor plant) used to be.
“Someone had walked onto our property with a shovel or trowel, selected one of my new lovely small bushes, and dug it out of the ground to take home,” she said.
“I guess it was just too tempting for someone to walk by them and not take one.”
She has since filled in the hole and planted a small hosta in place of the pilfered euphorbia.
- With files from Kirsten Clarke
