Umbrella terms: how the Bots became a crime scene

Of all the various gems of advice given to me during my training at the National Botanic Gardens many years ago, “Beware of old ladies bearing umbrellas” was the one that confounded me initially. What could it possibly mean? Should I anticipate the occasional sharp thwack from a passing parasol? A painful prod in the back as I pruned the roses? No.

Instead, it was patiently explained to me that the “Bots”, with its vast collection of botanical wonders and historical rarities, represented a smorgasbord of horticultural delights that some dedicated gardeners found it nigh-on impossible to resist; the result was the occasional mysterious disappearance of plant material from the gardens. Those seemingly innocuous umbrellas? Light, strong, capacious and waterproof, it turns out that an umbrella easily doubles up as the perfect “swag bag” if dangled, unopened, from the arm.

In other words, the ideal receptacle in which to stash away a few pilfered cuttings or a hastily harvested seedhead.

Despite the warnings, I never succeeded in catching any plant thief red-handed (or should that be green-handed?) during my time at the Bots. Instead, rather like Scotland Yard's Flying Squad in TS Eliot's Macavity the Mystery Cat, the perpetrator was inevitably long gone by the time I had come upon the crime scene.

Sometimes, they had gone to astonishing lengths to acquire the object of their devotion. One day, while on student placement in a city-centre Dublin park, I arrived at work to discover that someone had managed, overnight, to scale the tall railings and remove a giant specimen of Agave Americana Variegata, a fleshy succulent famed for its fiercely spiny leaves. The plant was at least two metres wide and almost as tall. To this day, I wonder how they managed it.

Far more serious is the increasing number of rare plants in private and public collections that are being stolen to order. An example is the theft of a very rare species of water lily, Nymphaea thermarum, from Kew Gardens in 2014, scooped out of the ground by someone who had had to crawl precariously along a railway sleeper to reach it. Similarly, last autumn, the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens reported the theft of rare carnivorous plants, one of 40 such plant thefts at the garden in the past three years.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, a professional horticulturist in charge of an important historic Irish garden recently confessed to me that he deliberately mislabels some of the rarest plants in the collection as a way of stymying efforts of persistent plant thieves.

With some unusual varieties of snowdrops being sold for hundreds of euro for each tiny bulb, Galanthophiles (snowdrop aficionados) are apparently the worst offenders. Come to think of it, you could squeeze a hell of a lot of snowdrops into just one folded umbrella.