Emma Cooper

Have you ever read a book (or watched a film, or played a game) that involved fictional plants, and wish you could grow them? Which ones stick in your memory?

There are plenty of novels that mention plants, and some of them even have them as integral parts of the plot (I might talk about those in the future), but the ones that tend to stick in my mind are the ones that make up an entire flora of fantastical plants with qualities so wonderful you wish they were real.

When I was younger I loved Anne McCaffrey’s books, particularly her Pern series. For those of you who haven’t read them, the Pern series is about a group of colonists who leave Earth for a new and simpler life on the pastoral planet Pern. The planet has a nasty surprise up its sleeve, though, and the colonists get cut off from Earth and have to learn to live at a much lower technology level and with an unfamiliar set of resources. The series actually starts centuries later, when the resulting population has very little memory of its past and knows nothing of the universe beyond Pern.

They are lucky enough to have found several indispensable plants in their native flora. The first is numbweed, which completely removes pain without side effects and can be used externally and internally. It’s time consuming to harvest, and processing it is smelly, but they wouldn’t be without it. Medicinally they also use the Fellis tree – juice from its berries make a lovely soporific that knocks people out. On a day-to-day level they also appreciate edible tubers (although the nicer ones seem to have been imported from Earth) and the coffee replacement made from Klah bark. If you’re starting to think I’m a bit nutty then I’m not the only one – all of the plants of Pern (native and alien) are listed in the Healer Hall wiki.

Unless you’ve buried your head in the compost bin you should be familiar with J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which not only has a range of fantastical plants with magical properties, but an entire school subject devoted to them – Herbology. There are many more plants mentioned in the books than appear in the films, but some firm favourites have to be the carnivorous Devil’s Snare that tries to entangle people, Gillyweed that allows you to swim underwater until the effects wear off, the Mandrake that has screaming babies for roots and the Whomping Willow that is one protected species that’s perfectly capable of taking care of itself.

If you’re thinking that’s all kids stuff then you should be more interested in the beautiful and yet completely bonkers Field Guide to Surreal Botany. Beautifully laid out and illustrated, the book is written (by many different contributing authors) in the style of a series tome on botany, but you’ll have to be very luck to spot any of these plants in the wild. Some of my favourites are the CouchKelp (a seaweed with a large, overinflated bladder in the shape of a couch), the Kitty Willow (whose beautiful, fluffy catkins develop into little kitties with a life of their own, who kill pests by playing with them to death), the Wind Melon (whose fruits contain enough helium to make them float at the end of their stems) and the Library Plum (which only flowers when the local librarian population reaches critical mass and whose fruits taste slightly of old books).

And for those of you who don’t read books for whatever reason, there are two games you might like. I’ve already mentioned the first, which is Plants v Zombies, a fun romp through your back yard (and front yard, and roof) where an army of well-equipped plants try and prevent the zombies getting inside the house and eating your brains. One of the basic plants is the Peashooter, which fires peas with deadly accuracy. There’s also the Potato Mine, which is deadly to any zombie that steps on it (sadly there’s no time to harvest the resulting mash for dinner), and the Blover, a lovely clover-like plant that can blow away fog and floating zombies. At night time the fungi come out, including the Fume-Shroom, which gases zombies with its puffs of spores.

(BTW, although it’s great on a desktop I have to say that Plants v Zombies on the iPad is awesome! The multi-touch interface makes things so much more interesting.)

And lastly, although I used to play FarmVille and gave it up there is still one Facebook game that still I dabble with. On Enchanted Island you’re a trainee wizard who washes up on the shores of an island that has a history of magic. You learn to conjure various types of plants, and although you sell most of them you also use them to complete certain quests. Plants range from the mundane (the Lemongrass makes a lovely cup of herbal tea) and vaguely familiar (Exploding Cherries make lovely firework displays) to the more unusual. The Lettucefish (which looks more like the Pak Choi fish!) swims in swarms and attacks Lemonsharks and the Powerful Dragon Vine can be used to incinerate unwanted plants.

Do you have a favourite fictional plant?