How plant thefts blossomed into big business

Telegraph

30-03-2025

'Many many welcomes, February fair-maid!' wrote Alfred, Lord Tennyson of the graceful snowdrop, whose pearly little buds are among the first to push bravely through the frozen soil at the start of each year. Their appearance aptly coincides with the ancient Christian festival of Candlemas, which celebrates the triumph of light over darkness – and the sight of these nodding white flowers carpeting woodland, parks and back gardens in great milky drifts is, for many, one of Britain's greatest natural spectacles.
Yet, increasingly, you are as likely to see sorrowful little holes in the ground where snowdrops once blossomed as you are the snowdrops themselves. Last week, volunteers were desolate to discover a clump had been taken over night from Ballard Water Meadow in New Milton, Hampshire. Since a pile of logs intended to attract fungi and wildlife had also been taken, the finger was pointed at members of the public looking to replenish their woodpiles and back gardens. According to the group's Facebook page, it's not the first time it's happened. 'Please return them,' urged the team. 'They were bringing so much joy to all the visitors at Ballard.' Sadly, the appeals are yet to have any success.
The little theft of a snowdrop clump for personal pleasure is thoughtless but relatively innocuous. The whole scale removal from wildlife reserves, churchyards and woodlands on the other hand is heartbreaking. It's also big business. In 2019, Stefan Simpson was jailed for 10 months for stealing 13,000 bulbs worth nearly £1,500 from the Walsingham Estate in Norfolk, while in 2014, William Adams was fined £370 after removing 5,000 bulbs including snowdrops, bluebells and wild garlic from woodland in Cumbria. Both are relatively rare cases of prosecution: Norfolk has such a problem with snowdrop theft that, in 2021, police admitted that whole areas of woodlands were regularly being stripped. Moreover it's impossible to put a figure on the scale of the problem, since no data is collected on wild flower theft, but the common wild snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) can be worth thousands when enough of them are sold online. Invariably they are purchased by unsuspecting members of the public looking to buy them in bulk 'in the green' (the best time to buy snowdrop bulbs is around now, just after they have flowered).
'There's often a lot of skulduggery going on behind online adverts for single and double varieties offered in the green,' says Joe Sharman, who has been cultivating rare snowdrop varieties at his nursery outside Cambridge for more than 30 years. 'It's been an intermittent problem for centuries – in the 18th century the Dutch would trade in snowdrops removed from the Loire Valley. More recently there have been cases of companies that, having stripped woods in Norfolk, moved into Lincolnshire and are now illegally digging up woods in Fife and Ayrshire. Some of these people are selling in the green all year round. There is no way these bulbs can have been legally grown when you look at how cheaply they are priced. Of course, the same thing happens with bluebells.'
Snowdrops and bluebells, which are also bought and sold in the green, are vulnerable to such theft ironically because they are so widespread – it's easy to steal them en masse because they naturalise in the wild unlike, say, daffodils. Other plants are illegally sold because they are more rare. 'There are people who sell orchids on the internet who dig up orchids from the wild and then sell them to unsuspecting customers by claiming that they are raised from seed,' says Bill Temple, from the Hardy Orchid Society. 'Part of the problem is that the demand is greater than the supply. The problem [has also been partly] caused by Brexit – the cost of phytosanitary certificates and inspections means that the price of importing a few plants, or even seeds [from abroad] has become extortionate.' Nor is there a great deal of awareness about illegal plant sales, largely because the problem is so hard to police. But, globally, it's an enormous industry: in 2022 a World Wildlife Trade Report calculated the global trade in wild plant trafficking between 2016 and 2020 to be worth around $9.3 billion – about five times bigger than that of illegal animal trafficking.
A large percentage of this trade is driven by private collectors – and many of them want snowdrops. Around 20 different species exist in the UK, with around 500 named varieties, and the rarest can fetch hundreds of pounds. In 2022, a single Galanthus plicatus Golden Tears bulb, cultivated by Sharman over an 18 year period, sold for £1,850 on eBay, a world record. As a result of such prices, the more unusual varieties have become more desirable and many gardens open to the public with impressive snowdrop displays have taken to extreme measures to protect their more valuable collections following a spate of thefts. RHS Wisley, for instance, have stopped labelling their snowdrops by variety. Others plant them in subterranean cages. Sharman talks about the varieties he grows in code with his co-workers in case anyone should overhear, and keeps his most valuable specimens in a hidden garden. He compares such thefts to that of art from museums. 'To steal a very rare snowdrop, of which there is only one, in one garden, it's like stealing a Van Gogh,' he says. 'People can be utterly obsessive and avaricious. Of course you can never sell it. If the Carolyn Elwes bulb [a unique variety stolen from Colesbourne Gardens in 1997 with curious yellow marking and never recovered] ever turned up, everyone would know it had been stolen.'
'But there are other people who would steal something from a garden anyway,' Sharman adds. 'My aunt would have a big hanky and every time the hanky dropped, something else would come up inside it. For some reason people have a different idea about plant theft than they would if it was something else.'
The law on picking wildflowers is a little murky. It's legal to pick a few wild flowers at a time, unless they are protected, but it is illegal to pick or uproot them without the owner's permission. This means it's illegal to pick daffodils from public parks, with police warning just last week that anyone caught doing so could face a fine of £5,000 and even a six-month prison sentence. 'There is still a lot of ignorance about the picking of plants from the wild in people who are not intent on criminal activity, but don't realise that they are technically stealing from another's property,' says a spokesperson from the Wildflower Society. 'They also don't realise they could be endangering the survival of species – even when it is not a scheduled [protected] plant.'
Botanical history is littered with plants existentially threatened either by over-picking or by collectors intent on possessing those that are particularly rare or distinctive. Orchids, which are notably striking in appearance, are particularly susceptible. The summer lady's tresses orchid went extinct in Britain after the last remaining plants were stolen from the New Forest in 1956. The lady's slipper orchid was once a common sight across northern England, but by 1917 it had disappeared; a single plant discovered in 1930 has since been successfully propagated, although only one native site remains. In 2014, a specimen of the world's rarest and smallest waterlily Nymphaea thermarum was stolen from Kew Gardens; the thief was never found.
The irony is that many plants stolen in this way are unlikely to survive. Orchids in particular need very specific growing conditions and will almost certainly perish if they replanted in different soil. Snowdrops hate being uprooted while in flower and may well not flower the following year if they are. Moreover, their loss often has a knock on effect on the immediate surroundings. 'The theft of mature plants has an impact on the pollinators and insects that rely on them for food,' warns Alex Lister, a manager at Northumberland Wildlife Trust. 'Those pollinators are already under threat, so why make things harder for them?'
He sees casual theft taking place on a regular basis, with everything from violas to primroses to Northern marsh and lesser spotted orchids being removed from the various nature reserves across the county. 'It's much more common than you think. It goes unreported most of the time. There's an attitude in this country whereby people think they have the right to do whatever they want to do, be it go anywhere, pick anything, forage for berries, leave litter,' he says. 'And if people see something nice they just take it home. But its heartbreaking for those who tirelessly work to nurture and protect wild flowers.' He wonders if the public today is simply more ignorant about countryside, with many children unable to name even very common flowers, which can have a knock on effect on their understanding of how precious they are. 'You used to see adverts for the Country Code on TV [the animated 1971 advert, featuring Joe and Petunia is a notable example]. But you don't see those public information videos on TV anymore. And we all, particularly children, spend much more time in man-made outside areas such as parks than we do in the wild. Our understanding of how the country side works has slipped a little bit.' The message, though, couldn't be clearer, or more obvious: the British countryside is nothing without its extraordinary beautiful fauna. And whoever took the snowdrop clump at Ballard Waters, please put it back.