Following a comment Alexandra made on my last blog entry (Eco is such a dirty word), I’ve discovered there are more aspects of the natural world Sci Fi loves to hate, specifically : plants and trees. It doesn’t seem to make sense to hate the basics we need to live, and I floundered until I read a chapter of The Poison Principle by Gail Bell, called The Lethal Greens. Many herbs growing in our gardens are poisonous, and many were used by ‘witches’ or wise women in the Middle Ages to make medicines.
Some poisonous plants growing in our gardens are belladonna, buttercup, catoniasta, foxglove, heliotrope, hellebore, lantana, mistletoe, morning glory, opium poppies, rhubarb, and verbena. Other poisonous plants we’re familiar with are cannabis, hemlock, henbane and wormwood – even if we wouldn’t recognize them growing. So a large number of plants are associated with witches, magic and being burned at the stake. Fairies are also associated with the colour green, perhaps because people saw fairies when they ingested poisonous plants, giving them hallucinations.
In addition to these associations there is the branding of nasties with the word ‘green’. For instance the drink absinthe used to contain aconite, making it a slow poison. It was labeled with a green fairy. And Green Dragon is a mixture of marihuana and datura which is normally fatal.
So we need trees to breath and we must eat our greens, but we must also avoid poisons that come from green plants. The odd thing is that these plants don’t usually feature in Sci fi. It’s carnivorous plants that dominate the bad plant scenario, with gardens full of them. Trees get bad press as well. Only flowers are free of the bad plant stigma, which given their poisonous potential is really weird.
This information also shows strong links between science fiction and fantasy, with a group of similar dangers present in each genre.
There are quite a few web sites which list carnivorous plants in movies and on television. They don’t necessarily discriminate between science fiction and other genres, and they often pick up on the use of carnivorous plants in the background of a film or episode which might be too trivial to notice, or not. There is also disagreement about whether fungus is a plant or not (what else is it?).
Characters and Weapons
There aren’t a lot of characters with names relating to plants, and they balance between good and evil. Commonly used flower names for girls are Holly, Lily, May, Myrtle, Rose, Viola, Violet. Buttercup and Daisy are used for animals. These names are usually benign in line with the mostly benevolent use of flowers, and they tend to be old-fashioned. But there are others:
Plantman (Megaman series/ Rockman EXE Axess ) and Poison Ivy (Batman and Robin/ The Adventures of Batman) are both evil.
Flower Child is a good character Dr Who The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and the alien flower in Earth 2: Flower Child which starts out badly, eventually has a positive effect on the whole planet while
Bluegrass is a member of the silverhawks, the smell of applegrass in Doctor Who: Gridlock is a positive, but grass generally doesn’t count.
Death Blossom (Last Starfighter) is a weapon and in Babylon 5 The Parliament of Dreams it is a black flower left by the Assassins Guild as a warning. Both meanings are negative and there are no positive blossoms (there must be one in a cartoon somewhere!)
Carnivorous Plants
There are real carnivorous plants in the world, but we don’t see them very often. Names you’ll see in web lists are Nepenthes and Sarracenia, also called pitcher plants. Real carnivorous plants aren’t very big and eat insects. There are bladderworts and butterworts which catch their prey on sticky leaves. And they don’t have to be villains: we all enjoyed Cleopatra, the African Strangler Plant in The Addams Family, vainly trying to eat visitors and being given yak meatballs and zebra burgers instead.
Sci fi has taken the evil intent of plants a lot further in films:
- Attack of the Killer Tomatoes/ Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! and Killer Tomatoes Eat France! Plus a series. Mutant tomatoes eat humans.
- Day of the Triffids - humanity is threatened by a huge, malevolent breed of plant.
- La Isla de la Muerta – Another insane scientist breeds carnivorous plants which consume humans blood. Aka Man Eater of Hydra.
- Land Unknown, The – An Antaractic expedition finds dinosaurs along with carnivorous plants.
- Little Shop of Horrors- the display plant Audrey Junior eats the customers. (Farscape kept the name Audrey for a plant that tried to eat Moya.)
- Lost World, The 1960 Plants surviving with the dinosaurs appear to be carnivorous.
- Minority Report Carnivorous plants Nepenthes and Sarracenia flourish in a hothouse.
- · Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens Van Helsing describes a Venus fly trap as the ‘vampire of the plant kingdom’.
Television series plants
Andromeda: Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way Sarracenia hybrids are said to be ‘tundra plants’.
Battlestar Galactica: Downloaded Features a Sarracenia in Sharon’s quarters.
Doctor Who: The Seeds of Doom The Krynoids are plants which absorb human knowledge from their victims.
seaQuest DSV portrayed a whole garden of carnivorous plants on Calimar Colony (By Any Other Name ).
Lexx: Garden The character Lyekka is re-grown with all her carnivorous appetites by Daffodil, Tulip, Lilly who she rewards by eating.
Lost World: the Guardian A jungle tribe feeds a carnivorous plant they can’t kill.
Star Trek Voyager: Initiations/Prototype Sarracenia Leucophylla is briefly seen.
Gardens
You wouldn’t think gardens would be evil, but in sci fi they can contain carnivorous plants or they can be the setting for dirty deeds.
Carnivorous gardens include the ones in Lexx: Garden and in seaQuest DSV: By Any Other Name
Gardens used for plotting and betrayal include US Botanic Gardens in X-files Anasazi and the Valley Forge Gardens in Andromeda : A Heart for Falsehood Framed. Crystherium Utilia in Farscape: We’re So Screwed: Hot to Katrazi was a Scarran garden on Katrazi used to show the Charrids and Kaleesh as incompetent. Babylon 5 had a garden where people meditated as well as discussing politics.
Some ‘gardens’ are cemeteries as in X-files Paperclip Garden of Remembrance, or memorials to the dead as in Red Dwarf Back to Earth : The Garden of Reflection
In The Adventures of Pluto Nash : The Garden of Eden and The Garden of Paradise are both hotels.
Trees
Trees also get bad press in Sci Fi. It appears the Ents in Lord of the Rings haven’t made a big impression on anyone, or perhaps Old Man Willow in The Hobbit is more memorable.
Trees are negative in Doctor Who: Mark of the Rani and in Lexx: A Midsummer’s Nightmare . In Blackstar There is a Tree of Evil versus the good Sagar Tree and in Power Rangers: Dino thunder the Tree of Life becomes bad Deadwood.
Only in Ewoks is the Tree of light positive.
Interestingly not a lot of specific tree names are used in sci fi : Pine is incorporated into town names and Maples is one character.
Flowers
Flowers have special significance in real life and in Sci Fi. There are alien flowers and funny flowers (Think of Lexx: Kai wearing flowers while singing to skulls!) but flowers in Sci fi are used to show love, magic and happiness. The only flowers that are consistently bad are blue flowers, and they are not natural.
Anstellian Tundra Flowers (Andromeda: The Fair Unknown); ,Ardosian orchids (Deep Space 9: Broken Link); Arum Lily (Lexx: Twilight );
Bluebell (Stardust);Blue Flower (A Wrinkle in Time/Batman Begins/Scanner Darkly); Bouquet (Torchwood: Adam);
Chrysanthemums, yellow (Doctor Who: Rise of the Cybermen); Crystillia (Star Trek: The Next Generation: In Theory );
Daisy (Farscape: John Quixote/ Deep Space 9: Past Tense/ The Invaders: The Possessed/seaQuest DSV When We Dead Awaken); Dandelion Clock (Journey to the Centre of the Earth 2009);
Gardenia (white) (Stargate SG1: Memento Mori) ;
Irises (Smallville: Reaper ); Iris, yellow (Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp );
Lilac (Deep Space 9: Trials and Tribble-ations); Lilies, pink (Earth Final Conflict: In Memory);
Muktok (Star Trek: The Next Generation: Ménage a Troi); Mustard Plant (Beware! The Blob);
Orchid (Earth Final Conflict: Truth);
Paper roses (SQDSV alone ); Pericules (Star Trek: The Next Generation: Ménage a Troi);
Rose (Jericho: Condor ); Rose, white (Smallville: Reaper / Doctor Who: Daleks in Manhattan/ Stargate SG1 Memento Mori/ Star Trek: The Next Generation :The Host);
Snowdrop(Stardust);
Tulips (Smallville: Pilot/ Shimmer);
Zainias (Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Nth Degree ); Zan Pericula (Star Trek: The Next Generation: Ménage a Troi)
And wherever you are in a TV series, film, game , novel or graphic novel: DON’T GO NEAR THE VINES! They’re always out to get you!
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