The Case of the Kidnapped Camellia

Mr. Strega and I came home this evening to find that a big camellia plant I have had happily growing in a large pot in the front yard was stolen! It's been in the same damned spot for seventeen freaking years, ever since I bought the house. Suddenly some jackass comes and steals it right off the property in the middle of the day.
Not a good idea to rip off from someone whose online name is "Ms. Strega!"

There's not much I can do, short of putting my camellia's picture on a milk carton. Mr. Strega walked down the street and talked to the neighbors, asking if they'd seen anyone at the house that day, but they hadn't been home. The theft was a source of much amusement to the sheriff I called. He told me to look around the neighborhood for it, but that it was likely ripped off by some unscrupulous landscaper (let's face it, it was a gorgeous camellia specimen, though not a rare one). The sheriff also got a laugh when I said that camellias probably weren't the type of plants he was looking out for up in these mountains.

Still, since a lot of people from Felton read this blog, do email me and let me know if you have seen someone with a five and a half foot tall, fully mature camellia plant, with snow-white blooms (like the ones in the picture), in a black plastic pot, which has suddenly appeared in their yard. I know it's not as spectacular as the case of the missing yellow submarine in Felton (if you don't live here, it's just too, too hard to explain), but you never know. What's most disturbing to me is that someone was hanging out on my property, just taking what they wanted (and of course, that's what the officer was concerned about, too).

Surfing the Web, I discovered there really is a certain amount of plant theft--a gardening board had postings from landscapers, homeowners, and nursery owners, describing all kinds of weird thefts. One nursery owner caught a landscaper and his client jumping the fence and ripping off plants late at night. Another guy had the world's ugliest juniper plant stolen out of his front yard. Mr. Strega told me there was a huge problem in Southern California at one time, of folks ripping off ornamental palms (the small ones) out of people's yards. His mother had one in her front yard and someone knocked on her door one day, offering her a fair chunk of change for it.

Anyway, I'm pissed about it--I've been lucky to not have a lot of thefts in my life, but this counts as the strangest, and the most pathetic in some ways. I mean, a camellia? It's almost Pythonesque ("dozens of rogue gardeners have been seen skulking around hedges, looking for camellias to steal. What is the world coming to?")

My only consolation is that the camellia was fronted by a large stand of poison oak which I had not yet got around to ripping out, so I hope the camellia thief discovers that the hard way!