I am so sorry to hear that your White Out was kidnapped. I've had potted roses stolen from me, but never had a plant dug up.

Dirty, rotten scoundrels!

Now I'm thinking, maybe I need to move the potted ones up closer to my house :) Not to mention, I just planted 8 bareroots from David Austin along my driveway, and they haven't even broken dormency yet. I'd be heartbroken if they were taken. Hopefully, whoever took White Out just thought that the subdivision entrance garden was just a free-for-all, and they don't venture onto my actual property! Besides, how many people actually KNOW how much we spend on our roses :)

I'm so sorry you've been robbed! Mine were taken from a garden along the edge of a gated, planned community and must have been another resident. MANY were stolen over the 18 years that garden existed. Theft is a hateful thing, even if they were misinformed or operating under false assumptions. Makes you want to post signs that it is NOT the "nursery" for the community and the plants BELONG to you, doesn't it? Thankfully, now nothing is exposed to anyone's fingers except the vermin on the hill. No one can get to anything and I'm liking that more and more as time goes on. Kim

oh, thefts at the allotments are legion. Twice I have caught people filling bags with someone else's produce - one woman calmly stated she thought they were available for everyone to help themselves. Perhaps they imagine this stuff just wafts in on the wind. It has not been unheard of for people to lose their entire crop of sweetcorn or potatoes (and that takes some doing, digging rows of spuds furtively). All my veggie area is in the centre so what most people see are the flowers and roses (although I sometimes have heavy losses in the strawberry beds). I wouldn't mind people helping themselves if they are hungry, and actually eating stuff but when you find your unripe apples strewn across the nearby road, this is disheartening (especially as they were my first real crop after a 4 year wait).

That's terrible. It's bad enough the monetary loss of the cost of the rose, but they also took all the work you spent on planting and tending it.

I'm so sorry, Tammy. Pulling a rose out of the ground is the lowest of the low.
Am I the only one who believes that bad karma is in store for those who sink low enough to steal other people's flowers? What goes around, comes around--and often from a direction you'd least expect it. You might not be there to see it, but I'm willing to bet there will eventually be a cosmic comeuppance for your thief.

Kay

My boyfriend of 7 years is a locksmith but he also installs security cameras in schools, business and homes so we have 4 camera with night vision so if any tries to steal my roses I will get them hehehehe

I've never had an entire bush stolen, but I've caught neighbors taking cuttings from my roses. The roses were clearly in my yard. They walked over with their pruners and started making a bouquet. I turned the corner, was shocked to see them and asked them what they were doing and they replied they were sorry and didn't think I would mind. All this time I thought the deer were eating them. Makes me wonder.

Wow that stinks! Sad that they'd just steal it like that. :(

If you can find Starry Night, it tends to bloom less and so might be a less tempting replacement.

I worry for your Knockouts, though. People know what they are and you've got a thief in the area. If you have some rebar you could hammer it into the ground at angles through the roots of the plant. It would make it harder for the rose to be pulled from the ground.

There are some real scum out there with no sense of personal ownership. (Those idiots who drove into the Holston River a couple of weeks ago, drove by my house to get to the river......and they didn't know what county they were in or what they had done between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning. Stupid or criminal or both. It's getting hard to tell the difference.)

Unfortunately, it seems to simply be a lack of personal accountability. Most of them KNOW you bought the plants, planted and tended them, but YOU and your expense, time and effort don't matter. They want it so they are entitled to take it. Why not? No one is going to shoot them over it. They won't go to court or jail for pinching a plant. I agree with you about Karma. We can only hope it REALLY bites them in the butts! It's disgusting when you see just how many weren't raised with, "if it doesn't belong to you, DON'T TOUCH IT." Kim

In Ohio now we have the same gun law as Texas and we can protect ourselves and neighbors, my brother in law has had some kids messing up his yard and one night they heard a clump of dirt or something like that hit the door so he went outside with his shot gun and stood out there for a few min.. it was funny to watch on his security cams... lol

Speaking of security cams on one's own property.....

sorry...

Jessica I think you misunderstood, I was approving. And in fact I am thinking of installing cams because there has been some petty stuff kids are doing.

I feel all of your pain. I haven't had any plants stolen...yet but I'm worried. I have all those roses out on the curb now and all the pots are in plain view on the patio so I'm really worried about this happening to me soon. I think we may have to invest in a camera system too. I have had roses taken from the plants. Unfortunately for me it was the week of my show and that really made it hard as there were some that I was hoping to have open for the show. And they didn't use pruners but just tore them off injuring the plants as well. Also the last two autumns we've had someone pick our apple trees clean, I mean stripped them, of apples. They didn't even leave the wind falls for us which leads us to believe they were probably only going to use them as deer bait for hunting. I use them for pies and applesauce for the winter and really missed them.

You hope that Karma will catch up to them but I wonder if these people are even bright enough to know they're getting payback. Or if they'll just blithely go along thinking they have the right to do what ever they please.

So sorry that someone stole one of your babies and all you were trying to do was pretty up the neighborhood. grrrr..... I use my bird camera also like a security camera. It doesn't cover a big area but when we are outta town I kinda point it towards my roses to see who comes to check them out while we are gone. haha!! Its usually all family members but its funny to watch. Hopefully HD or Lowes will have some back in stock and you can get you another one. Now if someone took ANY of my english roses that would be a different story. I would most definitely be the crazy rose lady on her warpath looking for the vilian. Heaven help em!! lol! Judy

I'm glad everyone understands my frustration! Now, if they would have dug up the butterfly bush, I would have been thrilled!!! That thing really needs to be removed, but its root system is massive! I guess I'll just try to root some cuttings off of one of my other roses (Ballerina would look pretty there) to replace White Out. I really don't want to spend anymore money if people are going to just dig up my plants and take them.

As for people stealing my fruit, that hasn't happened. Luckily, all my fruit trees are in the backyard within the fence. So the only one that steels it is my cocker spanial who has learned to jump up and rattle the tree...lol! Same fate for my raspberries and blueberries...eaten by the dogs long before they ever ripen.

Let me tell you, I will definitely be keeping my eyes open for a White Out in some of my neighbor's gardens ;)

Tammy

I, too, am sorry for this disappointing loss. While I have never had a rose pinched, people have helped themselves to our tangelos and cut bouquets of daffodils. As if we planted them just to be nabbed by strangers! How can one enjoy a stolen item?

I like TigerDirect as a source for a number of security cameras with infrared as well as daytime use and the systems have come way down in price and have their own recording capabilities.

A friend has one specifically for wildlife just to see what different critters were walking a path down the mountain from his place. Another caught a teenager taking the new bathroom fixtures and cabinets out of his house as it was being built.

I'd like to film the deer action in the orchard and among the old roses at the base of the hill.

lucille- oh lol

My other brother in law got his cams from Best Buy, those were a little expensive but they were good! He watched his house from his phone or the internet when he wasn't home.. With our set up we can do the same thing. We have a DVR which he programmed to record when the cam senses motion, 2 min before and 2 min after and the picture is great. I would contact a security company to get a quote personally and not go to a home improvement store or to see if best buy has them in your area.

I am so sorry.

After ten years at our place, the same happened to me last summer and I just felt so devastated. It wasn't a rose but it was a group of ligularia that I loved. Our house is far from the road. I have a group of perennials by the mailbox which have never thrived (deer, shades, salt from the plowing in the winter you name it.) I finally got the ligularia to take off after several years of pampering. They looked amazing. We went away on vacation and we come back and found a huge hole in the ground and the plants gone! I imagine they were casing the joint so to speak, planning their plant theft.

We live in a rural area on a quiet cul de sac road with no traffic where many of our neighbors don't even lock their houses. It had to have been in inside job which just freaks me out.

HaHa this actually happened to me --

I was out for my daily walk and walked back to my property approaching it from the other end of the street.
Someone was there when I got there, clipping a few roses, and she had a vase with her, so this was planned.

I stopped and looked at her quizically, and she volunteered "the lady that lives here said it was okay."
She threw the roses on the ground and left when I calmly looked back at her and said "I am the only lady who lives here."

I think that was not the first time she did that, but it was certainly the last. (I hope.)

kstrong- Oh my hahaha you actually caught her, but why did she throw them on the ground...

These things happen. I don't plant good plants in front of my house anymore. I wanted to get a security system, but it was cost prohibited. I researched the idea, but you have to buy a special dvr to make the recordings and then what do you do? You give this video to police of someone digging up your rose? They won't anything about it. If you report things to the police, they just have this attitude, that your problems are trivial. Sometimes when I see an neglected rose, I want to dig it and kidnap to save it, but I don't. It is much worse to take a healthy plant, then a dying one.

For me, it was a good-bad thing to have my plants stolen from my container garden in southern California. Every plant was eventually stolen except for my roses. That was the beginning of my rose passion.

In all the years I had nothing but roses in the container garden, only one rose was ever stolen. Thank God I had two of that one.

My sympathies are with anyone who has a plant stolen. It's such a wretched feeling to lose the plant, but it's almost as bad to know that someone would stoop that low.

Lyn

Laxatives in the brownies. If I had a bunch of front yard roses getting stolen, I'd beg for Mermaid cuttings here, root them, plant them out front, and giggle when someone made off with them.