By Joe Anuta
Forest Hills is one of the most verdant neighborhoods in the borough, but luscious plant life comes at a price.
Resident Ruth Malin said her trees and garden have been under attack from neighbors who conduct midnight pruning sessions and passers-by who help themselves to fragrant flowers from her front yard.
“It’s a new kind of theft, I guess,” Malin said. “I’ve heard of it in Manhattan.”
Malin has lived in Forest Hills for 40 years and is an avid green thumb, but she has had to change the makeup of her garden over the years.
Her hydrangea bush has been a popular target. The large bush has lost its vibrant purple orbs to callous bandits who have plucked them off after dark.
Her tulips were stolen so often she had to stop growing them.
“I used to have 250 tulips,” she said. “And somebody used to come and take them.”
Malin would wake up in the morning to find roughly two dozen of the flowers missing at a time.
And if the leaves are snipped off as well, the perennial plant needs them to store food for the winter and will not grow back the next spring.
The nighttime thefts gradually diminished her garden until there were only 20 flowers left.
She bundled them up and dropped them off at the 112th Precinct.
Malin believed the thefts were too ridiculous to alert the authorities, so instead she has planted fewer flowers in an attempt to avoid the eyes of roving flower thieves in the neighborhood.
“I decided to plant low-growing plants,” she said. “Now it’s a bed of green.”
But Malin is not a wholly innocent victim.
“In Queens Village, I took a walk once when I was 5 years old,” she said. “I saw the neighbor had tulips and I cut them all off and brought them to my mother.”
But the Forest Hills robbers seem to have charged interest on her karmic debt.
Once the sun goes down, the back of Malin’s house, which faces a shared alley, is not safe from assailants either.
Neighbors have chopped branches of two trees she planted.
A small viburnum tree in a communal alley looks more like a coat tree, with shortened stumps that stick out where full limbs used to grow. Malin said neighbors amputated many of the limbs in the middle of the night.
If the limbs encroach onto a neighbor’s property, Malin could forgive them for pruning.
But she also has a large cedar tree behind her house whose limbs have been gradually lopped off over the years by another neighbor. Many of the limbs only grew over Malin’s property, but the circular scars around the truck show where they all have been cut. And that has affected how the tree grows.
“When you do that to a tree, it accelerates its vertical growth,” she said. “I have this monstrously tall tree with no branches.”
Other horticulturalists in the neighborhood also said they have been the victims of plant-napping.
Deb Groshen said her husband tend the large garden in front of their home, and once came out to find a whole row of flowers dug up at the roots.
“There was just a hole,” she said.
Reach reporter Joe Anuta by januta@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.
