What the Pluck!
Someone came into our peaceful, wee forest and deliberately plucked out plants by their roots and then scattered them along the entire length of the path. The wreckage looked fairly fresh so it must have happened yesterday or earlier today, but who would do that? And why? It isn’t exactly violence, but it has the look of violence about it and it’s certainly senseless and stupid. Those plants were probably minding their own business, just doing that growing in the summer thing that plants do. I doubt they were shouting out insults or hurling stones at passersby nor were they likely to be plotting to do mischief at midnight. Sheesh! I hope whoever did this get weeds.
Poetic justice would be if those plants were poison ivy. That would be a lesson to that herbicidal maniac.
What the devil. When I saw the photo I assumed someone was tidying up the garden. My neigbours do this regularly.
Randomly attacking plants is a sign of a very sick person.
@ 2 DonDueed
No poison ivy unfortunately. I have years of experience with it and it is just not there.
Stinging nettles, in fact.
My deer pull the plants up, throw them around, and leave them for dead. It may simply be sloppy plant predation.
One other possibility is that someone is pulling out an invasive species. Looking closely at the picture, the plants that have been torn out of the ground look a lot like a type of plant called garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), which I think is considered an invasive species in parts of Canada and the USA. I’ve pulled up a fair bit of it in my garden and the wooded area on my property. I wouldn’t pull it out in a public park or woods, though.
I wondered if it was somene pulling up an invasive species, you see that in the UK with Himalayan Balsam, often pulled up by members of the ‘Friends of’ where ever you are whenever they take a walk there and only periodically collected up for composting.
I just signed up to reply to this old post! I am 100 percent sure that the uprooted plants are garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata). Saying this as someone who has pulled 1000’s of them from woods in Minnesota. IMO its a good sign that someone is pulling them out, it is a problem all around the Great Lakes and can displace many native woodland plants and hinder native tree regeneration.