Yeah. That’s pretty much how I solved this in my head. I just couldn’t say that this VERY considerate and expensive gift is sort of pointless.
And they are good. Perhaps they may help in some way.
My Wife and I where going through my mothers estate on December 24th. We found a nice silver and turquoise ring that my mom bought when the three of us where in Mexico 28 years ago. She likes it very much. So that’s something I guess.
My Wife sometimes walks the dogs at night in the Colorado mountains (that’s our house). I bought her a pretty cool head lamp.
I don’t know how it is where you live, but in Switzerland all terrestrial orchids are protected. So that adds another legal angle to the argument.
And even if the orchid isn’t protected, it is very difficult to transplant terrestrial orchids as each species has a symbiotic relationship with a very specific type of mycorrhiza, which in turn is very sensitive to the conditions (light, temperature,
moisture, acidity) of that exact location.
Have you ever had success doing this?
We’re talking about a branch here, right?
I say take it. Sure, stealing is absolutely wrong, but let’s keep things in proportion here. This is a branch, and a branch owned by a giant faceless corporation at that. Nobody would get into any trouble if you took it. So take a walk on the wild side. Live the outlaw life. Embrace chaos. Snip that motherfucker.
IMHO, crime does not scale up. Just because you’re willing to steal a branch, that doesn’t mean you’d steal a wallet, or a car, or a child. Some things are just too minor and inconsequential to apply grand moral theories to.
OK. my wholesome answer to this dilemma:
You love bonsai. You saw a specimen with a lovely form. Get a young plant and try to reproduce the effect you saw and admired through patient training and pruning of your own growing plant. That is exactly the spirit of the art of bonsai.
Yeah, right.
It starts with a branch. Next it’s uprooting whole shrubs, then trees. Pretty soon you’re walking off with entire forests.
“Judge, I never thought it would get this far, honest.”
Yeah, I had this discussion a while back (the context was taking a pebble home from the beach, vs commercial bulk exploitation of the same mineral resources) - the ‘but what if everyone did it?’ argument. Snipping off a tiny piece of a growing plant to use as a cutting would be a problem if everyone did it, but that’s not a thing that is going to happen. Not everyone is going to do it, so it’s not usually a problem.
I tend to agree with this, but in this case it was not just a branch it was the entire plant I needed. In this particular case replacement value would have been about $20.00 plus the labor for the gardener to replant the new plant. If I would have taken it I would have replaced it with an equal or better specimen.
Something like that happened to Macbeth.
The Guardian takes on “proplifting”.
“Online groups like Reddit’s r/Proplifting encourage their members to “rescue” and nurse back to life abandoned succulent leaves and stems from trash cans, Home Depot floors, or neglected corporate landscaping.” (italics added).
People stealing cuttings or entire plants from shops and botanic gardens are nothing new, but the trend seems to have accelerated along with the craze in rare plant collecting fueled by millenials/Gen Xers.
A nursery in my area recently opened up a large greenhouse largely devoted to unusual and pricey house plants. I wonder what security system(s) they use.
There are a lot of shrub cutting thieves in the federal pen. They’re typically incarcerated in supermax.
I have, sort of.
The property next door to me was purchased by a developer. The backyard was a wooded hill, and the developer planned to blast it to make a level lot. After he had all the trees cut down, and before the blasters came, i noticed a large ladies slipper plant, which is a terrestrial orchid, and legally protected. So, it was illegal to dig it up. But it was going to be blasted to oblivion in about a week.
I dug it up, with a large clump of dirt, and transplanted it onto my property, which was still a wooded hill.
It lived the rest of the season, came up the next spring, and had two large gorgeous flowers. Then one day it completely disappeared. My hypothesis is that it was eaten by deer. It really disappeared, there were no dead leaves or anything. And it did not come back after that.
Right, it could be very complicated.
If someone came in and asked if they could take one of the landscaping plants out in front of my store, it would not be mine to give. I could give them the info for the building owner or the building management, but it still wouldn’t necessarily be theirs to give. They have a contract with the landscaping company, who are the ones who actually own the plants.
When those plants are removed and new ones installed, the old ones are usually not thrown away, they are often transplanted to a new location if they are still in good shape.
Especially if the property you wish to acquire doesn’t actually belong to me.
The “what if everyone did it” argument has never been a question literally asking what if every single person out of the 8 billion in the world did this, it has always been a shorthand for “What if enough people did it for it to become a problem?” in the cases where it is actually used by those objecting to a behavior at all, and it’s not just the argument assigned to them by those who want to engage in that behavior, which, IME, is the far more common example.
And I can see it becoming a problem, if some tiktok or other social media influencer goes viral showing off where to get such a cute little bonsai tree, I’d expect to start seeing holes in commercial landscaping all over the place.
Bonsai hunting has been a thing for as long as I remember. Most of the pilfered plants are taken in forest lands where it is illegal to remove any plants. Permits are now issued if applied for. Commercial landscaping has always been known to be a rich source of plants with bonsai potential. I used to look up building that were scheduled for demolition and check them out for any plants with potential.
The answer, in most cases, is the same. They won’t.
And that assumption there is exactly how we end up with tragedies of the commons.
And the assumption that they will is exactly how we end up with perfectly benign activities being banned.
The answer is to have laws on the books to protect against over-exploitation of whatever it is that needs protection, but only enforce the law against those who really over-exploit.
In the example of taking pebbles from the beach, fine those who take buckets, or truckloads full of pebbles, but don’t fine the little girl who takes a pebble from the beach for her pebble collection. If (a big “if”) too many little girls start pebble collections to the point of beach pebble depletion, then enforce the law more strictly.
We have laws against taking sea oats from beach dunes in Florida without certification. Offenders will get a substantial fine, but I don’t believe they’ve ever fined a little girl who picked a sea oat to take home. I don’t know about little boys…maybe they throw them in the slammer. 
I like to rephrase it as, “what if everyone who wanted to do this did it?” Because that makes it explicit that what matters is how many people choose to do something.
Litter? Everyone would like to get rid of their trash, yes, we need a rule against it
Cutting a small branch to propagate? I dunno. It may matter how rare the plant is. Honestly, if you can buy a whole plant cheaply, very few people will be inspired to attempt to grow their own clone. But if it’s a rare plant you can’t buy, there might be a problem.