Pluck not the wayside flower

Pluck not the wayside flower;

It is the traveler's dower. ~William Allingham I have a garden friend, some one's garden I walk by, and admire, sometimes we chat. She lives on a corner lot, near the hospital, and has the most admirable salmon, and red poppies bordering her lawn. Huge, colorful beacons that are apparently just begging to be plucked, snipped, cut, snitched or broken off. She never has a seed pod left to give away any precious seed. Every last one of them is stolen, not given away, but taken. In the early morning by the gentleman out walking his dog, in the evening by the young family pushing a baby stroller, in broad daylight by the older woman with the large shopping bag. They leave nothing but green twigs starkly pointing to the empty sky. People even go so far as to steal the poppy pods when they are still green, before the seeds have ripened, obviously they want them before they all get taken by someone else. It is a good thing that these beautiful poppies are a perennial variety or they would never get a chance to reseed. Having a gorgeous flower garden near the hospital comes with it's own difficulties, many of her neighbors have reported seeing people marching right up to a stunning rose bush and taking a bouquet of flowers. Does this mean that the hospital gift shop is charging a premium price for cut flowers and visitors need to get them at a reduced price from the neighbors garden. Is that called being cheap, or opportunistic? It is one thing to lean over the garden fence and admire from afar, it is quite another to plod through the poppies and help yourself. It might be time for my garden friend to adopt a very large guard dog. They can call him "Poppy".