quote:

Originally posted by ARman:
Someone that night came by and stole about $30,000.00 worth of landscaping. Trees, shrubs, flowers, and mulch. Yep. Got most of it.

Call the main office, they called the police. Police officer came and wrote a report. Told us that it happens all the time.

Who knew!


ARman

Commercial landscapes are usually more accessible to thieves and less frequently monitored, which makes them prime targets.

On one occasion thieves stole several thousand dollars of containerized plant material from our garden center one night. They selectively chose material that was closest to our entrance from the remote country road, and plant material that could be quickly loaded in a vehicle, while ignoring the larger heavier (more expensive) trees/ shrubs positioned further inside our fenced property farther from the entrance.

I spent the next 2 nights sleeping in a sleeping bag on a nearby out-of-sight deck with a 12 gauge nearby but the thieves were smart enough not to return.

Ha. Reminds me of a story from my yute. A neighbor down the street had these nice 10’ pines in his tree lawn. One morning he woke up to find one of them missing. Somebody cut one down and took it.

He called the cops who when arrived, noticed a trail of pine needles in the street. So, the cops followed the pine needle trail to the back of the subdivision whee they stopped. If I remember correctly, the tree was tied to the back of a car in the driveway. Anyway, the cops knocked on the door and the kid inside admitted to cutting down the tree, tying it to the bumper of his car and dragging it home.

His reason was that he wanted to get a Christmas tree for his parents. Too bad he was a couple months too early....

I see Y'all haven't visited Laurel county. Even downtown London isn't filled with the most educated folk. As you get out into the mountains a little, things go downhill fast. Not bad folks, but some of the adventuresome young adults don't follow rules when they get a bit tipsy. 'Em boys go out and drink some beer and have fun. Just a guess, but they'll wear that theft as a badge of honor for years to come.

quote:

Originally posted by Modern Day Savage:
Many people don't realize just how valuable established mature plant material actually is.

Yep. As landscape items, or even as lumber.

People would be surprised at what a high grade mature cherry or walnut tree goes for.

This wasn't what I expected to read when opening the thread.

I have arrested a guy in the past for stealing a tree, but it was a walnut. Knew the homeowner was at work, cut the tree, limbed it out, winched it onto a trailer, left. Took it to sell, but the buyers only buy from professional tree services. This is because of people stealing the dang trees!

Stupid tweakers.

I don’t know if this tree qualifies, but my parents had people offer them $40,000 for a Japanese maple that was in their yard.

A few years back, in Hutchinson, KS, somebody stole a Japanese Maple soon after someone planted it. Those can be very pricey.

quote:

Originally posted by tanksoldier:
I don’t know if this tree qualifies, but my parents had people offer them $40,000 for a Japanese maple that was in their yard.

quote:

Originally posted by 85win:
A few years back, in Hutchinson, KS, somebody stole a Japanese Maple soon after someone planted it. Those can be very pricey.

Before going into management I spent several years as a foreman on an installation crew.

We had one residential customer we had worked with over several years in installing various phases of their design, although this was my first time working with them.

On this particular day we had a fairly small install job, including a few small plants and one rather large Japanese Red Maple, maybe 12' tall... but this was no ordinary Japanese Red Maple. One of our wholesale growers had pruned and shaped this particular tree so that its trunk had 2 very pronounced 90° bends in it, producing an offset but parallel trunk.

Often, on our residential jobs, the landscape designer who had been working with the customer would meet us onsite, meet with the customer, give the crew a set of blueprints to follow or otherwise instruct us on where to place the plants, and then leave and it would be up to the foreman and crew to "fine tune" the orientation of the plants.

I left the crew to tackle the smaller plants and I dug the large hole for the tree. Typically, a designer tries to determine where a prominent landscape feature like an ornamental tree might best be viewed and which side of the tree should face that direction...and, as I thought the trunk bends looked odd and deformed, I oriented the tree so that from the street the bends would be viewed in the same plane, effectively camouflaging it. We finished the job, cleaned up, and left for the shop.

When we got back the designer grabbed me and explained they had a complaint from the customer. Apparently they wanted the Japanese Red Maple oriented so that the crazy bends in the trunk were readily visible from the street...so my crew and I went back the next day and dug up the heavy tree and rotated it. Customer paid BIG bucks for that "defective" Japanese Red Maple and they wanted their neighbors and passerbys to gawk at it.