Just strange

Over the last two summers, our local drain commissioner implemented a "rain gardens" development for our neighborhood. The job was a mess, took longer than expected and cost more than expected. So, of course, he won an award for it.

I lost about a foot of property all along the west side of my yard. (Well, not "lost" exactly - it's still there, but now it just slopes down into a ditch instead of being part of the lawn. There are wildflowers and native plants all along the road, which may look better than a regular ditch, and it is supposed to improve drainage from heavy rains.

Now to the strange part ...

During the last three weeks, I've caught two different older women digging flowers out of the rain garden next to my house. The first woman stopped in the road, pulled a hoe out of her backseat and dug out two large flowers. She put them in her car and drove away. She saw me looking - I had pulled into my driveway and was staring at her from my car, wondering why she was so taken with the flowers that she had to dig them up.

This past weekend, a woman pulled into my driveway, got out, and started digging flowers out of the rain garden. She had a giant carpet roll (I don't think anything or anyone was inside it) tied down in her open trunk. After 10 or 15 minutes, she got back into her car to leave. At that point, I opened my front door and looked out. I thought maybe she'd toss a courtesy wave at me or something to acknowledge that she was in my freaking driveway. However, she looked every which way except toward me as she sat in her car for a bit before backing out and driving down the road.

Now, I could be wrong, but these look like normal flowers. I'm no botanist, but I don't think they're special or unique. I guess they look nice, but I would have been just as happy with concrete-lined ditches instead of rain gardens. So I'm probably not the person to ask about the aestheics of wildflowers.

Should I have stopped the women? Or maybe I should have helped them pick the flowers? Maybe I'm not aware of the proper ettiquite for wildflower pickers or, as I call them, flower thieves.