Flowers in public gardens are for everyone to enjoy and picking them just spoils it for others, the Christchurch Botanical Gardens director says. It follows some brazen thefts in the Garden City, of not just flowers but entire plants. In fact, they have even decided to no longer plant tulips in one display because they are disappearing almost overnight.
Christchurch Botanical Gardens director Wolfgang Bopp told Checkpoint the flowers and plants are for everyone to enjoy. "The idea is you enjoy them; you leave them alone. You leave the place as you find it.
If you pick a flower today, I can't enjoy it tomorrow," he said. "If you pick it at 12pm, nobody can see it for the afternoon. The idea is we can all enjoy it across the city.
That's what they're intended for." An argument that comes up regularly is just picking one flower such as a daffodil will not make a difference, he said. "You then just have to think if everybody in the city did that it would be 100,000, 200,000 to 300,000 fewer flowers of those daffodils," he said.
"You want to enjoy them. These days there's probably very little that is nicer than walking through a beautiful daffodil meadow, in springtime, whether that's within Christchurch or whether that's in other cities or in other gardens." Bopp said because the botanical gardens had thousands of daffodils, they did not usually count them - but they did notice when a large amount was missing.
"We do notice it now and then. But then again, in other cases it gets .