For the second September in a row, flowers have been quietly plucked from porches, planters and even the public safety building, leaving residents wondering who is responsible for the string of botanical burglaries.
Local nursery owner Sabine Churchill still can’t believe the audacity.
“They took a hanging basket of flowers from the public safety building, which is really gutsy,” she said. “Annual flowers. Absolutely drop dead gorgeous, pink and purple lush flowers.”
For Churchill, who tends the borough planters under contract, the missing blooms are a thorn in her side. It’s not the first time her handiwork has been uprooted.
Last September, the thefts grew from one yellow missing Gerbera daisy to multiple Salvias (a type of sage plant) and a couple of purple Veronica.
She estimated the value at hundreds of dollars.
“I bet you the total, it was probably $600, $700,” she said, adding that the disruption to her work also increased her costs.
“It probably was more because then I’m on a project site, so all of the sudden I have to cut somebody loose [to go fix it]. It interrupts the whole flow,” she said.
The losses were significant enough that she raised the issue with the city manager in 2024.
“She said, ‘Let me call the chief of police,” Churchill said. “Only in Alaska do we call the chief of police. What I loved is that they really checked into their surveillance camera.
But no culprit was found. Churchill said she has been occasionally driving around town and looking into people’s yards to see if she can spot the missing plants.
“I have my suspicions and will not, if you torture me, I will not share them,” she said. “I think somebody has those in their yard.”
She isn’t alone. Real estate agent Pam Long, who owns an office and apartment downtown, said a bandit made off with her begonias this summer too.
“It’s not a hanging basket, it was sitting on the porch on the back of my building,” she said. “I put plants out there every year.”
The disappearance appears to have happened in the last week, right around the same time the flowers disappeared from the public safety building.
She left town for the weekend and returned to find the pot gone.
“They lost petals, you know. And whoever took it like picked up the petals and took the whole container and the flowers,” she said.
Unlike Churchill, Long chose not to file a police report. “I just told my friends like ‘damn it,’ do you know what’s happened to me?”
Long said she won’t let the theft keep her out of gardening, but she liked the pot. Next year she’s thinking of planting only what she calls “dumb plastic pots.”
Neither of the 2025 thefts have been formally reported to Haines police, though police say they’ve been asked to dig into the issue but so far haven’t turned up any leads.
Churchill suspects the missing baskets and perennials may be blooming somewhere unseen.
“It was so strategic that I think somebody has this in [their yard],” she said.
Both women said they realize the thefts don’t rise to the level of more serious crimes – but the crimes still leave them stumped.
“I don’t care if somebody needs to have something out of poverty, but this is just a nuisance,” Churchill said. Long agreed, saying she hoped to keep the perspective that it’s just an isolated incident.
“I don’t want to spend a bunch of my energy being upset about relatively trivial things,” she said.
Still, both said the thefts feel personal
“How sad, you know? Everybody, the whole town has the joy of looking at the flowers and one person takes it,” Churchill said.
Long put it more simply: “The biggest feeling that goes through me is someone took advantage of me and took something away from me and that’s not nice and it doesn’t feel good.”
Until the mystery is solved, residents are left watching their porches like hawks. Or maybe like ravens – since, at least once, Churchill said she wasn’t sure whether the missing blooms on the cruise ship dock were stolen by one of the ubiquitous tricksters (they love some of the blooms) or perhaps an otter.
For now, the flower thief – if there is just one – remains at large.