When Sarah Cross, owner of Across the Prairie, left her shop one Saturday evening, her pollinator garden was thriving — full of native wildflowers and monarch caterpillars in their final stage before becoming butterflies.
By the next morning, the plants were brown and brittle.
Security cameras showed why.
Before the shop opened, a man pulled into the parking lot, stood in front of the Monarch Waystation sign, read it, then walked down the row of plants spraying poison.
“They just took their little can of spray and went down the pollinator row,” Cross said. “Unfortunately, they were covered in monarch caterpillars.”
The Crime and Investigation
Tulsa Police are now investigating.
“If someone else comes by and poisons [plants], that is a crime,” said TPD’s Richard Meulenberg. “That person is liable for damaging that person’s property at the bare minimum… and vandalism, bare minimum vandalism.”
Meulenberg said police are treating it seriously:
“That’s not your stuff, man. Don’t be poisoning someone else’s stuff — let alone hurting our ecosystem, which is fragile as it is.”Why These Gardens Matter
For Cross, the loss isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about survival.
Since the 1980s, monarch populations have dropped 80 to 90 percent. The butterflies lay eggs only on specific host plants, such as milkweed. Without them, their numbers can’t recover — and the ripple effect spreads through the food chain.
“If nobody on your street has those caterpillars in their yard, then all of a sudden, those birds are going to disappear,” Cross said. “It’s not just the butterflies. It starts with the bugs.”
Monarchs are critical pollinators, carrying pollen from flower to flower over hundreds of miles during migration. Each fall, they travel thousands of miles from the U.S. and Canada to central Mexico — a journey no other butterfly makes. Scientists warn that if breeding grounds in places like Oklahoma vanish, the migration could collapse within a generation.
A Pattern of Destruction
This isn’t the first time Cross has seen her work destroyed.
She’s donated plants to schools, parks, and nonprofits — only to watch them weed-eaten or sprayed within a year.
“Even if you put a sign with a butterfly on it, I guess it’s not clear enough,” she said. “I think it’s just a lack of education. Just because something looks a little bit messy, it doesn’t always mean we’ve got to cut it down right away.”
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