When I was a child I spent one autumn helping Ma plant Carlton daffodils down either side of the (private) muddy driveway leading to our farmyard ... one day in the spring we arrived home from market to find a car parked blocking our driveway and a family picking all the daffs ... Pa was angrier than I'd ever seen him before ... he nearly let Ma loose on them!!!
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
and includes bluebells, wild gladioli, orchids and so on, wherever they are. It is also illegal to touch anything in a specially protected area like a nature reserve, SSSI or similar.
I find picking any wildflower morally reprehensible, but a meal’s worth of mushrooms seems ok. But as a child Iwastold never to touch anything! And our family went by the adage that you should take nothing but memories and leave nothing but footprints.
I love that saying Helix. Going to remember that one...
The place where my parents' ashes are scattered is about a 20 minute walk from the nearest road, along a steep river valley. When I visit, especially if I'm with my niece, I'll pick a very small bunch of wildflowers and grasses from the hedgebanks as I go, and then drop it into the stream at the spot where we left them.
1. I had written permission from the landowner to scatter the ashes there in the first place (it's a nature reserve). 2. I don't want to take garden flowers in case I accidentally introduce something problematic - so better to make my little bouquet from the plants already there. As I don't actually remove them from the reserve - just move them a bit - I can't see it would be a problem. 3. I never pick flowers from protected species, and I 'tie' my bouquets with a grass stem, not string or anything 'artificial'.
I do see people picking buckets of elderflowers from the hedgerows along our private lane sometimes (we're about a mile from the road). Which probably means they are planning to make cordial or wine or champagne in enough quantity to sell. That is illegal. It also deprives the birds of the berries (which people also come along and pick in vast quantities). I would report it as theft but I'm really not sure who to report it to. I doubt the police would see it as a priority compared to theft of farm vehicles and livestock. I'm far less concerned about people picking blackberries from the hedges. For one it's hard to do much to a bramble to stop it growing and for another, there are invariably quite a lot that you can't get at in a decent bramble thicket. I have lots of elder trees in my garden and propagate a few more each year from hardwood cuttings (always having asked the permission of the tree first, as is traditional), so hopefully I'm growing enough to make up for the losses locally.
People just don't think of nature as a finite resource
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Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.