The Greenhouse Odyssey: Fourteen-Something’s Missing
By Lorraine Miller
One beautiful spring afternoon, a guy came in to the Grass Menagerie wearing a trench coat. No, he didn’t sport a glued-on mustache or dark glasses, but still, I should have known better. He seemed to be enjoying himself looking at the cactus so I went into the workroom. A few minutes later, the little bell over the door jingled, so I knew either he’d left or someone else had come in. I went to see. The shop was empty. I walked to the front and saw the cactus display had been ravaged, hardly a 2” plant left. He must have stuffed a dozen in each pocket. I raced to the door to see if he was still around, but of course, he wasn’t.
Robbery is an act of personal violence. It feels physical! My legs went weak and I felt sick to my stomach, yet no hand had touched me. I felt hollowed out—a moment of disappointment in humanity.
There was nothing I could do. Maybe his karma would catch up with him.
The night of the cactus heist, a dear friend came over to console me.
“This is so disheartening,” Mark said. “You work hard all day and then some jerk comes in and steals all your profits. It’s just not right! We’ve got to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“How can we do that?” I gasped
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “We’re going to make a security camera.”
“What? How?” I asked.
“Do you have an empty Cheerios box? A toilet paper roll, sans toilet paper, will make a perfect lens.”
Oh, I get it now.“I’ll get some jute. We might as well put eyelashes on it. I’ll get the scissors, glue and the rest of what we need.
Mark, a fantastically brilliant guy with a very silly side, had me out of my sad mood in minutes. He glued the end of the toilet paper roll to the top of the Cheerios box and we clipped some short pieces of jute, frayed the ends and glued them to the tip of the toilet paper roll, like eyelashes. He held the finished product for me to see and admire.
“Look like a camera?” He asked.
“Exactly,” I said. “You’ve got such ‘know-how.’”
“Got the nails? Let’s go install it,” he said.
Down in the shop, I brought out the 12-foot ladder. Mark ascended. He opened the bottom flaps of the Cheerios box and tacked them to the wall.
“That should do the trick!” he said, making sure the camera was angled correctly. He climbed down the ladder with such a look of pride.
“I feel so much better, so much safer. Thank you,” I said.
Word must have gotten out about the security camera because a few weeks later, a competitor came into the shop and asked me if the camera really worked. “I haven’t had any theft since I installed it,” I told him. “But I’ve been too busy to review the tapes.”
And karma did come. I was at a hamburger place called the Hungry Guy on Thirteenth East near the U of U. It was noon and the order and pickup windows were lined with people. I saw him in the crowd and he saw me. Our eyes locked! He looked scared. He should look scared. As stated earlier, I’m no shrinking violet. I yelled at him in front of everyone waiting for their burger, “Hey, you’re the guy who stole plants from my store. You’re a thief! You just filled up your pockets with cactus and ran out of there. You thief! How does it feel to steal someone’s living?” I didn’t let up. I harangued him until he ran for his car and sped away. The whole crowd turned to me and cheered. I felt so much better. So vindicated!
That was then. This is now. With three independent buildings, the cactus house, the foliage house and the Garden Wall, I have unwittingly created a thief’s paradise. It was almost impossible to keep all the bases covered.
There was always an employee in the gift shop, so theft was not an issue there. But while I originally hoped to make my living selling cactus, most of our work was in the foliage house. Too often, the cactus house was unattended. In the back of the cactus greenhouse was a bench of very rare plants: Ariocarpus fissuratus, Aztekium ritterii, Lophophoro williamsii, Uebelmania pectinifera, Dioscorea elephantipes—stuff like that. This collection of plants was not for sale. We kept them as museum pieces or botany class subjects and used them to teach interested customers about the unique characteristics of cactus.
One by one, they disappeared. Turns out one of the unique characteristics of cactus is that they are easy to steal. Pocket-sized. Each theft is disheartening. Each hurts. We did everything we could, short of putting a padlock on the greenhouse door, to slow it down. We tried to make sure one of us was in the cactus house at all times but that had its problems, too. We slowed the theft but it remained a problem.
As a kid, I remember my father giving me a lesson about stealing, how wrong it is to take another person’s belongings. He told me a story about a theft he witnessed. He was in a grocery store at the checkout line. The woman in front of him was antsy and impatient to get out of the store, dancing from foot to foot. All of a sudden, she passed out cold and just hit the floor. Her hat fell off and a frozen ham rolled across the floor. We’ve all heard about ‘brain freeze’ but stealing a frozen ham by hiding it under your hat gives the expression a whole new meaning.
Theft comes in so many forms.
Some people don’t want to steal the whole thing. They just want to snip off a leaf or a branch to get a leaf cutting. Christmas cactus are a favorite target. That’s not nice.
We had a customer, an interior designer, who consistently took plants to her clients on a Friday night, strictly on a trial basis. Strictly to see how they looked. She returned everything on Monday morning. The client didn’t like any of it. We always found a wine glass, a scattering of confetti, or a party hat in the plant containers. A guilty verdict was passed on ‘trial runs," and they were outlawed.
A guy came in with a cardboard box filled with a cactus called Pediocactus simpsonii, another species commonly known as ‘pin cushion.’ It’s native to the Uintah Basin in Eastern Utah. He’d dug up dozens, hoping to sell them to garden centers like mine. YOU SHOULDN’T STEAL FROM MOTHER NATURE! Naturally, I gave him a full-throated lecture and sent him on his way. Cactus taken from the wild don’t transplant well. Soil composition, elevation, exposure to the sun and water frequency are not the same and the plants don’t adjust. In fact, one cause of the loss of species in the wild is over-collection by humans.
As to the overcollection of plants in the cactus house, all the Cheerios boxes in the world wouldn’t help. My first love, my first greenhouse, my cactus, were under assault. I’ve learned a new business term, 'shrinkage.’ What a soft word for such a violent act!
I know there is only one solution to my dilemma. I’ve got to bring the cactus and foliage together under one greenhouse roof. That’s just not something I can do right now. We’ve just opened the Garden Wall and put in a new entry. The business books advised me to make money and preserve cash. I better hustle!