The bush burglar

CCTV of plant thief

A GREEN-fingered thief was caught red-handed after she was recorded on CCTV pulling up and taking a large plant from a Moorside garden.

The footage, sent to the Evening Chronicle, shows the elderly woman enter the garden on Ripponden Road shortly after midday on Thursday last week and begin tugging at a fuchsia bush.

After wrangling with the plant for a few moments and struggling to get a firm grip, it eventually comes free from the ground, allowing the shrub-snatcher to gather up the plant and make her escape down the road.

The owner of the plant, who wished only to be identified as Tara, said: "We'd noticed a few of our plants and flowers disappear from the garden over the past few weeks but we didn't think to much of it.

"But it was only when I noticed that the fuchsia bush had gone and left a big space in the garden that we decided to check our CCTV.

"When we saw the footage we didn't know what to think - we were just so shocked to see this old lady brazenly tugging away at the bush in broad daylight.

"We burst out laughing when we saw how hard she had to pull to get the plant out of the ground and then take it with her."

Tara added that it's a mystery to the family why the woman had entered their garden and taken the Fuchsia.

"We have no idea who she is, we've never seen her before so we don't understand why she did this or why our garden was targeted," she said.

"We considered reporting it to the police but decided not to, we thought it seemed too trivial and that they'd just laugh at us.

"But the CCTV footage was so funny we had to share it."