Don’t be the grinch who steals holiday trimmings

Talk about seasonal whiplash: In a matter of hours last weekend, my window box went from late summer glory to being dressed in its winter finery.

I kept waiting for the summer annuals to collapse in the cold, but even a short-lived snowfall or several weeks of willful neglect on my part couldn’t stop the Verbena, Salvia and Calibrachoa from blooming. I ended up pulling out plants that still looked great to make room for the evergreens, lights and branches that will fill the box through the coldest part of the year.

And although that was notable, the biggest shock of the season came when I was shopping for the winter display. Suddenly evergreen boughs and branches have gotten very expensive.

Perhaps it’s the sticker shock, or maybe the fading landscape, that brings to light just how many winter container ingredients are growing in areas where seemingly no one notices them. A gorgeous stand of bright red dogwood steps from the road or an overgrown evergreen on the edges of a natural area — they probably weren’t intentionally planted so a little bit of snipping wouldn’t matter, would it?

Well, of course it would, and while I admit that the thought has crossed my mind, I’d never pinch branches or any plant without permission. That’s partly because I know better, but also because gardeners understand what goes into growing a shrub or tree like those.

But non-gardeners might not have that perspective, which is the most generous spin I can put on the ongoing rash of people stealing trees and plants from public gardens.

The most recent case happened last week at the University of Washington, where a rare Tibetan cypress (Cupressus gigatea), a tree that can live to be thousands of years old, was cut down. The 5-foot, 8-year-old tree had been grown from seeds collected in China and shared with the Washington Park Arboretum to help safeguard the endangered species’ genetic diversity.

A few years ago, three 19-year-old members of a banned fraternity cut down and stole a much larger Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra ‘Algonquin Pillar’) from the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. The pledge prank netted each of them a $200 fine.

The problem is so prolific that some public gardens have taken measures to prevent more thefts. The University of Idaho has started spraying some trees with a foul-smelling cocktail of skunk scent and fox urine and marking them with signs warning would-be thieves. The Huntington Botanical Gardens in California does not immediate replace stolen plants, choosing instead to put up signs announcing that the plant was stolen, along with a link to a website about the problem of plant poaching.

Such theft defies logic, and while snipping a few branches from an overgrown dogwood might not be as egregious as cutting down a rare tree, it’s still not the right call.

I’ve already started planting more shrubs like dogwood and winterberry in my own garden for both their summer beauty and their usefulness as winter decorations. But there’s only one person who’ll be allowed to cut from them.