By late May, white flowers from blooming Venus' flytraps should have covered the boggy bottom of Wilmington's Stanley Rehder Carnivorous Plant Garden.
"It literally should be just white everywhere," said Jerry Bell, a city horticulturist.
But it wasn't. The sandy soil below was pockmarked with shallow pits – evidence of more than 1,000 flytraps stolen from the garden at the city's Alderman Park.
The theft was so massive it wiped out 90 percent of the flytraps in the garden...
http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20130530/ARTICLES/130539991?p=1&tc=pg
$20,000 worth of plants STOLEN! Use a reputable dealer!
That's a shame. I hope they get caught but I doubt they will.
Sad that so many people will be deprived of experiencing those plants at the garden.
The thieves are probably selling them on e-bay or farmers markets... or worse yet, if they didn't know what they were doing, they will all be dead before they can sell them. What a shame!
Horrible.
why the hell would people steal vfts.
they are cultured by the zillion and they sell for nothing.
http://www.ag3inc.com/Plants.asp?ID=2
worthless crime.
I just found this thread and read the news story. Does anyone know if they ever had any leads on the scumbag thieves?
I did some googling and ran across these two articles.
This was from October:
http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20131013/articles/131019863#gsc.tab=0
This from December:
http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20131227/ARTICLES/131229789#gsc.tab=0
The articles still reference the perpetrators as thieves (with no names) and leads me to believe that they have not been caught. It is good to read that a lot of the plants have been replaced and money was donated to help the park due to the theft.
That's good, and they said they'll boost security, too.