Gardening enthusiast Alan Durose is wary of little old ladies with bad colds.
When he last opened his Peterborough garden to the public, he noticed just such an old dear get out her hankie, blow her nose, drop the hankie conveniently over a flowering plant, pick it up and presto, the plant was gone.By the end of the day he had lost 700 plants.
"Little old ladies who smile and compliment you on your lovely garden are just as much a danger as professional thieves," he said.
Durose is just one more victim of the growing number of garden thefts, identified by Chelsea police in a survey conducted during the Chelsea Flower Show in May. The survey reveals that almost one in five of the 1,000 gardeners questioned had fallen victim to theft in the past two years.
People will take anything, from the obvious rare, valuable plants and old statuary to goldfish and large stone balls on top of gates.
The Chelsea survey reveals two incidents in which newly laid lawns have been rolled up and carted away.
"Garden thieves can sometimes be pretty brazen," said Police Constable Peter Waine, crime prevention officer at Chelsea Police Station.
"They will pose as gardeners to come and dig up plants. They may even cut your lawn for you while they are at it so as not to alert the neighbors. Then you'll come back home and the neighbors will say, `See you got the gardeners in then,' and you'll look outside and your prize begonias will have gone."
Police say there are two categories of garden thief: the gardening obsessive who just must have your flowering clematis for his or her garden, and professional thieves who sell what they steal.
"They may even use your stepladder and spade to break in and do over the house while they are at it," said Waine.
Sheila Preston from Blakeney in the Forest of Dean woke one morning to find thieves had stolen her back garden, including flowering shrubs, 30 trees, a bird bath and a water barrel.
"I was dumbfounded," she said. "They must have climbed the barbed wire fence and we didn't hear a thing."