Plants make up one of the Five Kingdoms of biology (the others being animals, fungi, protists, and prokaryotes) and are a fundamental aspect of Earth's biosphere. Doesn't stop stupid humans from portraying them inaccurately in fiction. This can range from anatomical design, certain behaviors, their application when it comes to medicine and toxins, and other ways they interact with the biosphere.
Sub-Trope of Artistic License – Biology and Plant Tropes. Related to Artistic License – Marine Biology and Artistic License – Medicine. See also Theme Park Landscape.
Subtropes include:
- Fungi Are Plants: Fungi being confused with or treated like plants.
- Glowing Flora: Plants having bioluminescence for no apparent reason.
- Lily-Pad Platform: Lily-pads are the stepping stones of the plant world.
- Man-Eating Plant: Carnivorous plants are almost animal-like and will eat anything.
- Marijuana Is LSD: Weed has a hallucinatory effect that kicks in immediately.
- Misplaced Vegetation: Any plant can grow anywhere with no problems.
- All Deserts Have Cacti: No matter where on the planet, expect a species of cactus growing there.
- Naturally Huskless Coconuts: Coconuts are depicted not having a husk, despite growing on trees or recently fallen from a tree.
- Talking to Plants: Talking to your garden plants improves their health
- That Poor Plant: The wrong liquid means instant death for a plant.
- Tomato Skunk Stink Cure: People use tomato juice to clean off skunk musk.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass, Ivy claims that plants are better than people because they only take what they need. There are many examples of invasive and territorial plants, including ones that actively suppress other plants from growing through chemicals
, such as sunflowers, broccoli, and walnut trees.
Films — Animation
- In Doggy Poo, a dandelion is fertilized by the eponymous dog poo, even though dog droppings cannot actually be used as fertilizer.
- During the song "What Else Can I Do?" in Encanto, Isabela creates a river of sundew and points out that they are carnivorous as a few of the plants "snap" their leaves at Mirabel. While the plants' leaves do move in response to prey capture, it's a rather slower affair: A struggling insect caught on the glue-like droplets of a sundew cause the leaf to fold over it over the course of an hour or so (unlike the rapid movement of a Venus flytrap).
Films — Live-Action
- Annihilation (2018): When the team discovers a field of plants that have grown in the shape of people, Josie the botanist theorizes this is because their hox genes, which dictate where parts of the body grow, were replaced with those of humans. However, plants do not have any hox genes and it's uncertain what would happen if they even received any.
- In Anonymous (2011), the Tudor rose is presented as a real red and white flower found in the gardens of the aristocracy. Never mind the fact that the Tudor Rose was just a symbolic metaphor made to represent the merging of the houses of York (whose crest was a white rose) and Lancaster (whose crest was a red rose), no matter which way you crossbreed roses, no real crossbred rose would have whole-colored petals as demonstrated in the movie.
Literature
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The second layer of the labyrinth is a forested region lit by a Weird Sun that never sets, which is said by Miligan to be the reason it's a paradise for plants. Actually, most plants do require a period of darkness for various reasons. However, since the labyrinth is an artificially created magical environment to begin with, one can probably safely say A Wizard Did It.
Live-Action TV
- Alma Gêmea: In real life, breeding roses can produce yellow, orange, pink, red, and white flowers, but not purple/blue ones, because roses lack the genes to naturally produce such pigmentation. "Blue" roses (which are actually mauve-colored, just like in the show) were first created in 2004 through genetic engineering of white roses, but in the show, Rafael somehow manages to create that kind of rose in the 1940s through traditional rose breeding.
Puppet Shows
- In the Sesame Street "Coffee Plant" sketch, Grover prepares Mr. Johnson a cup of coffee from scratch by picking coffee cherries from a bush and placing them into a coffee maker. Before the fruit can be made into a beverage, the seeds (aka coffee beans) must be separated from the fruit, then left in the sun to dry for a few days, then the parchment around the seeds — which forms during the drying phase — must be removed, then the seeds must be roasted, cooled and finally ground up in order to be turned into a cup of joe. If Grover did do all of these things, it would have taken at least a week for Johnson's coffee to be made.
Video Games
- In Animal Crossing, trees take three days to grow, and another three for the fruit to reappear once shaken off. Trees are also unable to produce fruit at all in the Winter. Although given how important fruit can be throughout the series, this is an Acceptable Break from Reality. Bananas also grow on palm trees in Animal Crossing, even though they grow from a type of grass in real life.
- ANNO: Mutationem: The Austrosteenisia blackii, commonly called the Bloodvine, is described in its item description as being usable for treating blood statsis and promoting blood circulation. It is primarily used solely for as a ground cover in gardening, and found growing only in rainforests.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- Crossbreeding plants in gardens can be counterintuitive as it can require completely different species of plant to get the desired result. One possible method of getting the coveted Thavnairian Onion involves crossbreeding Curiel Root (a type of parsnip) with Royal Kukuru (a type of chocolate bean).
- There are numerous plant-like monsters that defy normal biology. For instance, morbols are a type of mobile carnivorous plant with dozens of eyes and a putrid digestive system that allows them to debilitate foes with a Weaponized Stench. It's later revealed that they were designed this way by the ancients of the unsundered world who possessed The Power of Creation.
- The Utaru from Horizon Forbidden West are a farming culture who are given pouches of flower seeds at birth that they carry with them at all times. When the Utaru dies, that pouch is procured and brought to their tribe's orchard as a funerary right where the seeds grow into flowers. Under regular conditions, seeds can last as long as two years before they could be considered dead, ten years if under a controlled environment (which is unlikely given they're a primitive tribe that don't even practice smithing). Unless the Utaru swap out their seeds on a regular basis, their flower beds should be deader than the people they belonged to.
- In Little Red Hood, you can harvest cherries (a fruit that comes from Prunus trees) from palm trees. Real Prunus trees look nothing like palm trees.
Angry Video Game Nerd: The only thing the kick can be used for is kicking palm trees to make cherries appear. But please God, tell me one thing: Why are there cherries coming out of a fucking palm tree?!'
- Sonic Adventure has the boss fight against Chaos 4, one of Chaos' many forms, which Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles get to fight after Mystic Ruins. The gist of the fight is that the player has to hop between lily pads over the pond in order to avoid attacks from Chaos 4. However, lily pads are essentially just the leaves of the water lily and are incapable of carrying much weight before collapsing. Unless Sonic and co. are as light as a feather, the lily pads should've gone under as soon as they set foot in them.
- Undertale has Flowey's primary method of locomotion: he dives into the ground and then reappears in another spot, as shown during the moments he briefly submerges just as the player goes back to a previous screen. Flowey's capable of doing this during any of the stages of the world, including a perpetually covered snowland, and a melting hot volcano area. No flower can adapt so well to so many different environments without dying instantly.
Western Animation
- The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In "Find Her, Keep Her", Rabbit tries to warm up a growing carrot in the snow by dressing it in winter clothes. However, this should not have worked, as winter clothes only trap heat, not generate it, and plants have no body heat (since body heat is produced in the organs and plants have none).
- Spongebob Squarepants:
- Sandy's tree is portrayed as growing both apples and acorns, even though acorns only grow on oak trees.
- One gag in the episode "My Pretty Seahorse" involves Squidward crying after hearing a sad story, only to realize there's a plate of onions underneath him. Onions are one of the few vegetables with a lower density than water, so the onions should've floated away long before Squidward noticed them. Since onions are one of the prime ingredients of a Krabby Patty, this factoid applies to the show as a whole.
- April claims that the plant she gives the turtles at the end of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) episode "It Came From Beneath The Sewers" is a venus flytrap. Thing is, it looks nothing like a Venus flytrap. It looks more like a cross between an unbloomed rose and a Piranha Plant. Also, Venus flytraps don't exactly actively bite whatever's in front of then (like it does with Michelangelo). In reality, they passively waiting for a bug to crawl into its open leaves which clamp shut once three trigger-hairs have been touched in a short enough time. And they're still leaves that only close with enough force to trap a fly or other insect — they absolutely can't hold onto an unwilling animal the size of a human.
- In the Wander over Yonder episode "The Flower", Wander and Sylvia take what seems to be the last flower on a planet with them to try to find a new home for it, safe from Lord Dominator's quest to destroy the galaxy. Not only should removing the flower from its original place be enough to kill it, as flowers derive their nutrients from the ground and the flower spends most of the episode in a small patch of dirt, but most plant life is typically developed to survive in the environment they grew in specifically, and tend to do terribly in adapting to a new one.
