You could always ask a worker at the big box too…

No, you have it right, but you're missing human nature.

If there are a lot of people who want to propagate a rare plant... especially easily accessible ones in open-to-the-public gardens... not all people will wait for a leaf to fall.

Also, if you're in a private place (such as a plant nursery or a supermarket), you don't have a right to a dropped piece - everything of the shop belongs to the shop, even if you think they'll treat it as rubbish. If a bolt falls out of the display racks, you can't just say "ooh, free bolt on the floor, I'm keeping it", you know?

My partner works at a botanic gardens and they have to deal with this a lot.

For most plants, taking discarded material would be fine, but they have some rare plants that are subject to international diplomatic agreements - to paraphrase, "we will give you a specimen of this plant, usually in exchange for some other favour, but only you may grow it". If those get loose, it can spark an incident and potentially cause that international cooperation to cease.

These kinds of agreements sometimes happen for countries where previous expeditions have taken commercially valuable crops home and built an industry around them - e.g. the British stealing rubber tree seeds from Brazil in 1876, in order to set up competing plantations in south-east Asia.

And of course it's difficult to know which plants are covered by something like that, unless you're very up on your international botanical politics and are extremely good at telling similar species apart.

Picking stuff up off the ground works for a tiny minority of plants, mostly succulents. Most aroid plants (read: popular tropical houseplants) needs a growth “node” to propagate, and it would be very strange for it to somehow detach a node on its own and still have that node be alive and propagateable.

AFAIK — I’ve stolen many a cutting from my apartment complex (like, 3) but never tried roaming Home Depot.

Also the whole “endangered” bit is just distraction, IMO. Even if these plants were endangered, why do we care about them in particular…? Just because they’re pretty? They’re native to islands in Southeast Asia, I don’t think anything we do to plants in America will change their status — other than supporting poaching industries ofc, which is also a fascinating problem in the aquarium/fish community.

The point of the plant from the botanical garden is that they cut the actual plant.

Unlicensed reproduction of intellectual property

Self policing is often better than letting the lawyer or the cop police for you.

Anarchism isn't necessarily about doing crimes, but structures as a whole. An anarchist commune would self police, similar to this community self-policing what's fair game within their community.

A different form of anarchism, Libertarianism, places a lot more value on "I do what I want" style freedom and is often against self policing, ie "not my land, not my business". That attitude carried over to diesel truck modding, and as a result the feds had to step in, and hold performance shops and owners accountable for modding trucks to dump particulate. Had the libertarian style truck owners self-policed, maybe they wouldn't have lost out on a large chunk of their performance after-market.

note: this is not a comprehensive discussion of anarchism/libertarianism. Just explaining the op was misled on their assumptions.

I don't think people have a problem with someone picking up a plant cutting from the ground. Most likely their problem is with someone who cuts of a piece from a plant for themselves.

(And I'm being a bit uncharitable here of course, I guess it's also a sign of a nuanced and considered morality, in a way)

I would _seed_ them

My partner works at a botanic gardens.

A while ago, somebody walked out of the gardens having stolen an entire small tree.

Some people are shameless.

Not trying to do a gotcha here, but what is your opinion on "ordinary" digital piracy? I kinda feel like most people consider that broadly morally ok (in moderation), and proplifting doesn't really strike me as much different in any way (loads of underpaid passionate people work on big movies and games too)