TILLAMOOK, Ore. -- Thieves are making big money off Pacific Northwest public lands from native plants like ferns, salal and bear grass.

KGW photo/Grant McOmie

Deputy Seaholm talks to some salai pickers.

The plants are worth millions to the international floral industry. It’s an underground economy that is often supported by unaware consumers who buy holiday flowers.

It’s an interesting development in state federal forests where the money used to be measured by the height and girth of towering trees, but is now measured by the abundance of small plants grown lower to the ground where some people take advantage.

In the Tillamook State Forest, the theft of Special Forest Products is not the sort of crime that Forest Deputy Brent Seaholm is used to investigating and solving.

Normally, his duties deal with meth labs, poached wildlife or trespass onto private timberlands.

But these days there’s a new environmental crime that’s occupying his hours: the theft of native plants like salal and bear grass on a huge scale.

He hoisted a “bundle”of salal (it weighed about 10 pounds) off the bed of his pickup – it was part of nearly a thousand pounds of salal that he recently found in the forest while the people who picked it got away.

He explained to KGW why it’s so difficult to catch the guilty parties: “Well, that's not easy to do. They're up there in the hills and sometimes they can see you before you see them and often they run from us.”

Nearby, Deputy Landon Myers told KGW that native plant pickers have “hit the big time” on public land. Abundant stands of salal and numerous pockets of bear grass have made the picking easy.

Commercial pickers are required to buy and carry permits on the Tillamook State Forest.

While on patrol, Myers intercepted a small group of pickers and examined their permits. All seemed in order – until he noticed a problem.

The pickers had failed to document the amount of product they had harvested – and they had been picking thousands of pounds during the last week.

The documentation is required because it’s critical for forest managers to know how much of the material is harvested from the forest.

If you visit the Portland Flower Market – a wholesale floral market that’s located in the Swan Island area of Portland – you can see how the native plant materials are used. Colorful bouquets of flowers stand side by side with boxes of salal, huckeleberry, sword ferns, Oregon grape and tubs of bear grass.

Richard Bierman, the President of the Portland Flower Market Association, explained to KGW that the plants are prized as “filler” in bouquets and arrangements. Their greatest value is in markets like Tokyo and Paris because the plants – especially the salal – can last for weeks.

It’s a multi-million dollar business but he admitted that sorting out the legitimate harvesters from illegal pickers is impossible.

“Yes, that’s tough one! They have tried to pass laws on it, but as a wholesaler there's not much we can do about it. Can we control it? No, it's just a matter of who we choose to buy from.”

That’s the crux of the crime according to USFS law officer Bob Tokach. He’s a federal officer who works in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, one of the most popular forests in the country for picking salal and bear grass.

Tokach has been fighting illegal harvesters since the business first exploded on the public forest fifteen years ago. In fact, we weren’t with him on patrol for long before he intercepted a man who was picking salal.

The man told Tokach that he was a “salal buyer” and that he was just looking around.

But Tokach found salal in the man’s vehicle and suspects that he’s sampling and scouting for a larger group to come in later.

The trouble is that the entire area where the man was looking is designated as “wilderness” and it is closed to all harvest.

So, the man gets a citation!

Tokach told the man: “You can look, but when you pick, you need a permit.” Tokach told KGW that from his experience, pressure on the illegal pickers won’t eliminate the crime, but will simply move it somewhere else – like the Tillamook Forest – 150 miles away.

“They’ll go into areas - like the Tillamook – where there’s little or no enforcement – and if there's no enforcement - that's where they're going to pick.”

Back in the Tillamook Forest, Myers and Seaholm agreed that they are now dealing with a new business that they suspect is as big as the legal, permitted harvest.

They also know that it’s worth millions and they will have their hands full with a new crime – just in time for the holidays!