A century

In a garden of historic blooms, the plant poacher pursued a single prize. A rambling rose bush planted over a century ago and known for its striking, delicate pink flowers. The most iconic and most photographed flower at Wyck Historic House and Garden on Germantown Avenue: the tausendschön rose.

Sometime during the night of June 28, a thief climbed into the museum’s enclosed garden and, wielding dull pruners, clipped off nearly all of the living plant material from the tausendschön: some four feet worth.

The bush blooms ruffled pink flowers twice a year, fanning out dramatically over the colonial house’s entrance. But the thief left the plant so wounded it will likely not rebloom this year, or possibly much at all next year, Wyck staff said.

“There is a lot of shock,” said Kim Staub, the executive director of Wyck. “We are a public garden, we exist for our community and try to be a safe green space for our neighbors. We are really sad and disappointed.”

Staff have reported the crime to police at the 14th District, which covers swaths of Northwest Philly, but without surveillance footage, Staub and her coworkers don’t expect the thief to be found soon.

They are now trying to save this endangered rosebush celebrated for its beauty, but also for its historical and horticultural significance, and a draw for the often-overlooked museum. The tausendschön was planted in the 1910s by Jane Bowne Haines.

A descendant of the Wistar-Haines family, which maintained the house for nine generations, Bowne Haines was a Quaker educational reformer who founded the Pennsylvania Horticultural School for Women, one of the first horticultural schools of its type in America. It later merged with Temple University.

The theft is the first time anyone at the urban garden and community farm could remember someone stealing their plant life.

Emily Conn, a horticulturalist and manager of living collections at Wyck, said plant theft, especially of roses like those on the tausendschön bush, is not uncommon in the gardening world.

Some poachers steal to study or conserve a historic variety of rose — but that wouldn’t be the case at Wyck, where staff tend to 50 cultivars of historic roses, including rare ones thought to be extinct until discovered growing at Wyck.

The garden is the oldest rose garden in America in its original plan.

“The plants have not been moved from the locations that they were planted between 1821 and 1973,” Conn said. “It’s the same organism for hundreds of years. It’s a big part of what makes the garden so special.”

She can only suspect someone cut the tausendschön to grow them at home or to sell the blooms. There are online flower markets on Instagram and other social media sites.

The tausendschön had just finished its big spring bloom and was growing new shoots that would bloom again in the summer. The shoots are how Wyck staff propagate the plant for their own sales. They tend to them for two years before selling them for $50 a piece.

The thief went for the shoots — clumsily, Conn said. She was the first to discover the mangled rose bush: a crime scene of snipped stems and broken branches. It seemed like the work of an amateur.

“It was not someone who was very well-acquainted with roses,” she said. “It seems like someone who watched a couple of YouTube videos, or maybe one of these flower farming Instagram influencers, because the cuts caused a lot of damage.”

While the tausendschön is not the oldest plant at Wyck — some date to the early 19th century — it is the most dramatic.

“When people think of Wyck, they think of the roses on the front of the house,” Conn said.

The roses serve as a draw for the historic house — itself a repository of more than 10,000 artifacts that together paint a surprisingly detailed portrait of life in early Philadelphia.

It boasts one of Ben Franklin’s chairs; letters documenting the yellow fever epidemic of 1793; a buckskin suit for exploring nature, Lewis-and-Clark style; and thousands of everyday objects: oil cans, gardening tools, candelabras, books, children’s toys, and more.

“Imagine never cleaning out your family’s attic for 300 years,” Staub said.

But the roses pull everyone in.

Now, the staff is working to save them. The thief’s dull pruners ripped at the rose’s stems, exposing it to potential disease. The humidity and frequent downpours lately don’t help.

“Our biggest concern right now is that it doesn’t catch anything from all its wounds,” Staub said.

They expect it could take at least a year, if not several, for it to fully recover.

Still, Conn said, the plant has survived for more than a century.

“Mother Nature could have a lot to say between now and then,” she said.