Fantastic Flora

In real life, plants are important in nature. They provide oxygen, pollen for bees, and food for herbivores, and they make your garden look nice.

In fiction, however, things can get much more diverse and much, much stranger. Fantasy and sci-fi writers like to create their own unique plants with bizarre appearances and properties. Some may be carnivorous, fast-growing, explosive, springy, fiery, or even sentient.

You get the idea. They're very strange plants. They may be magic or found on alien planets or in other dimensions. If someone can control these things watch out.

In some cases, they don't have to be any particularly wild properties, and are more or less just analogues for real plants or fruit, but they're still called something fantastic. If unusual-looking plants or plant analogues make up a large portion of the background flora, this can overlap with Alien Landmass.

And yes, although they aren't technically plants, fungi are included here, too.

For the loose fauna equivalent, see Amazing Technicolor Wildlife.

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Subtropes:

• Alien Kudzu: Insanely tenacious invasive weeds of otherworldly origin.
• Alluring Flowers: Flowers whose scent is outright siren-like in its power to cloud minds.
• Botanical Abomination: An Eldritch Abomination that is also a plant.
• Fairy Ring: A Ring or circle of mushrooms.
• Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Produce with strange and unusual properties.
• Festering Fungus: Parasitic fungi that grow in and on other living beings.
• Foul Flower: A flower that is evil or dangerous in spite of its pleasant appearance.
• Fungus Humongous: Mushrooms in the same size range as trees.
• Garden Garment: Clothes made out of plants.
• Garden of Evil: A garden where all forms of life within are poisonous, corrupted, and extremely deadly.
• Glowing Flora: Plants and fungi that glow.
• Grows on Trees: When things that normally have nothing to do with plant life grow on trees like fruit.
• Healing Herb: A plant with supernatural curative properties.
• Innocent Plant Children: A child that is plant like which embodies a natural innocence.
• Intelligent Forest: A forest that is itself a massive, intelligent organism.
• Magic Mushroom: Mushrooms with magical properties.
• Man-Eating Plant: Whereas real carnivorous plants simply have leaves modified for trapping insects, these plant/animal chimeras will actively swallow and devour every creature they can reach.
• Meat Moss: Meaty, fleshy substances that grow like vegetative organisms.
• Multipurpose Monocultured Crop: Some examples go beyond simply producing many convenient things and are actively fantastic in what they can do.
• Mushroom Man: Walking, talking fungus people.
• Mystical Lotus: Lotuses are symbols of mysticism or magic, or are magic themselves.
• Planimal: Plant/animal chimeras.
• Plant Aliens: Extraterrestrial intelligences derived from vegetative life.
• Plant Mooks: When the villain decides to grow his own troops.
• Plant Person: Intelligent, talking plants.
• Pumpkin Person: Monsters with jack-o-lanterns for heads.
• Springy Spores: Videogame levels with giant, bouncy mushrooms that act like trampolines.
• Towering Flower: Flowers of disproportionately large size.
• Transflormation: Some form of flora that used to be a person.
• Treants: Giant, forest-dwelling tree-people.
• Vine Tentacles: Vine-based plants behave or are used like tentacles.
• When Trees Attack: The trees are alive and they want you dead.
• Wise Tree: Trees that are intelligent, capable of speech and full of wisdom.
• World Tree: A tree that holds up the world.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Planet Green from Doraemon: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend, whose surface is filled with giant trees and plants which doubles as houses for their plant people residents.
• Gesellschaft Blume: When an inhabitant of the world dies, their body sprouts a flower known as a Marquadt Piary. If that person died feeling fulfilled and peaceful, the flower appears white; if they died in pain or suffering, it instead appears red.
• Made in Abyss: Almost everything living below the surface and uppermost layers of the cavern. The Eternal Fortunes are a mild example, since they're normal-looking flowers whose only fantastic characteristic is being able to survive extreme environments. Further down, there are trees shaped like umbrellas pointed toward the center of the Abyss, and enormous "goblets" made from two different organisms living in a symbiotic relationship. The latter can be dangerous, as they fill with acid when young.
• One Piece:
  • The IQ plants, which stimulate evolution in animals that eat it. Dr. Indigo used them to create SIQ.
  • Some of Usopp's Pop Greens become very bizarre plants such as a bush that grows into a wolf and the bulb releases a 3-meter diameter shock wave.
• In Sig's Secret from the Puyo Puyo light novel series, Amitie describes flowers being planted for the Primp Festival called "tsukimawari", a name derived from the Japanese word for "sunflower". They do act like sunflowers, only they grow facing the moon instead of the sun.
• Remina: The titular land is covered in bizarre flora, and it all wants to murder you. Much like the rest of the planet.
• Tamagotchi: Melody Land, Melodytchi's hometown, is thriving with plants growing music-related items on them, such as bells and musical notes.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: Season 8 has the Supermen go into Xiao Haha's Portal Book A History of Magic, which features giant flowers instead of trees.
• Noonbory and the Super 7:
  • Glue-glob flowers, which resemble daisies. As the name suggests, they are incredibly sticky. They are used as a Chekhov's Gun in "Wangury and the Windbike", where they are used to foil the villains' plans.
  • Tooba-Achooba weeds, a type of flower carrying the Tooba-Achooba ailment. If disturbed, they swell up, and sparkles soon burst out. Anyone who comes into contact with the sparkles will get the Tooba-Achoobas.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf:
  • In Joys of Seasons episode 80, Sparky picks a rare tear flower, unaware of what it does when picked. The flower immediately starts to cry and then turns whoever picked it into a tearing flower themselves.
  • Mighty Little Defenders features mine flowers that explode as soon as one who steps on them lifts their foot from them.
• In Pleasant Goat Fun Class, the plants are shaped like perfect circles and curved rectangles◊, which is not quite how plants look in real life.

Comic Books

• Superman: In The Hunt for Reactron, Kryptonian Blood Bloom Plants vaguely look like a rounded Earth cactus, but their buds are made from a hard crystalline substance, and they secrete inflammable fluids.
• Tooth and Claw: There are "mineral gardens" where plants made of stone and metal somehow grow. Their "flowers" appear to be gemstones.
• Wonder Woman (1987): As in mythology the plant Moly is a defense against enchantments and magic and is planted around Circe's cell to keep her contained.

Fairy Tales

• "Jorinde and Joringel": The main character finds a strange crimson flower which can be used to nullify magic spells.
  Joringel went away, and at last came to a strange village; there he kept sheep for a long time. He often walked round and round the castle, but not too near to it. At last he dreamt one night that he found a blood-red flower, in the middle of which was a beautiful large pearl; that he picked the flower and went with it to the castle, and that everything he touched with the flower was freed from enchantment; he also dreamt that by means of it he recovered his Jorinda.
  In the morning, when he awoke, he began to seek over hill and dale if he could find such a flower. He sought until the ninth day, and then, early in the morning, he found the blood-red flower. In the middle of it there was a large dew-drop, as big as the finest pearl.
• "The Turnip Princess": The prince stabs one seemingly ordinary turnip which he apparently randomly finds. Then the turnip breaks in two, showing the magic nail which the prince was searching for, and a relief of a beautiful maiden in its hollow rind.

Fan Works

• Cave Dancers Pretty Cure: In Episode 9, Tosh discovers a new type of berry known as the markeen berry, which is glittery in appearance and grants its eater Super-Speed.
• Contraptionology!: While under the influence of the Nightmare, Applejack creates a giant dark-leaved, dark-wooded apple tree that embodies the cosmic concept of Constancy. It cannot be altered in any way — it plainly cannot be cut, uprooted, or moved, but neither does it grow or reproduce. When Ponyville is rebuilt at the end of the story, they simply have to plan the new town hall around it. It also produces a crop of seedless apples each Nightmare Night — it doesn't grow them, as such; rather, they're just sort of there between one day and the next — with golden skin and black, chocolate-sweet pulp, which if distilled into cider induces intense nostalgia for good times gone by and the feeling that things would be so much better if they just... stopped changing for a bit.
• Empath: The Luckiest Smurf: Smurfnip, which is the Smurf version of cannabis.
• The Flower's Dream: The "very special flower" whose dream created the breezies' world is sapient, a lucid dreamer, and capable of eating — it sends itself back to sleep by stuffing itself with the pollen of other flowers.
• It's A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door: Magivascular plants are a small group of plants that have a secondary vascular system that draws magic instead of nutrients or water, resulting in innately magical organisms. Examples include the beneviolet (a very powerful Healing Herb) and the canon poison joke (a flowering weed that causes a random, sadistically humorous transformation in whoever touches it).
• Nobledark Imperium: Necromunda, much like in canon, was originally a wasteland of a planet consisting of immense hyper-dense Hive Cities amidst continent-spanning expanses of slag heaps, exhausted strip mines, ash deserts and fields of toxic sludge, beneath skies choked with smog and toxic gases. This left the planet with a persistent food problem, which an ancient governor tried to address by commissioning the Adeptus Biologicus to scour the galaxy for any kind of plant that could be made to grow on the planet. The result was a mengaerie of flora, Earthborn and alien and of unclear origin alike, selected from a double dozen worlds and mainly of the kinds found growing around volcanoes or on Venus-like planets. The AdBio then spent decades crossbreeding the chimeric ecosystem they had created until they were able to create hybrid alien plants that could actually produce food; none of it tastes remotely tolerable but it can be processed down in edible slurries with most of the flavor removed and that's sufficient for the planet's needs.
• Rocketship Voyager. The Air Garden is used to grow food and recycle the air on the eponymous rocketship. These include vegetables grown to large size via cobalt irradiation, and a Soviet bioengineered triffidus (albeit a less lethal variety used for pest control).
• Shining and Sweet: Moondew sap can turn someone to stone. For unknown reasons, King Hippo is immune to this plant's effects.

Films — Animation

• Appropriately, Fantastic Planet is filled with this. In fact, much of planet Ygam's plantlife barely qualify as plants at all!
• Titan A.E.: The broken moon of Sessharrim, homeworld of the Gaoul, has its main land mass surrounded by hydrogen trees. These emerge from the water with twisted and gnarled trunks that carry globes of hydrogen gas. Tearing one of these globes begets a fiery explosion, some of which take out hostile Drej spaceships.
• Zootopia: The Night Howlers' ability to induce savagery in any animal is central to the plot. The flowers are distilled into a Psycho Serum that is used to target predators which allows Bellwether to rise in power.

Films — Live-Action

• Adele Hasn't Had Her Dinner Yet: The villainous Gardener grew many fantastic plants: A flower with human-like eyes that sheds tears; a flower with pollen that makes people freeze on spot immediately; a rose that can pour tea from a pot to cups, or cut its own rosebud with a pair of scissors and give it to a lady as a present. He also cultivated fast-sprouting beans used to rob apartments or a rose that puts ladies into deep sleep, used to invoke a very sinister scheme. The highlight of his devilish greenhouse is a carnivorous plant Adele that eats sausages, mice, dogs and people.
• Big Top Pee-wee: The title character is cultivating a hot dog tree, which is technically a bush, but does somehow grow hot dogs. Halfway through the movie he makes a mistake and the hot dogs shrink, giving him one that grows cocktail wieners.
• Nightbooks: The Apartment has a "night garden", a room full of magical plants that glow and are grown under blacklight, because real sunlight is toxic to them. They're watered with things like animal blood and are ingredients in magical spells and potions.
• Revenge of the Sith: The planet Felucia is covered in jungles of blue-green, twisting, bioluminescent plants and tree-sized purple mushrooms.

Literature

• Aralorn: The coralis tree attracts butterflies with its blossoms, then closes the petals above them and digests them.
• Downward to the Earth: The flora of Belzagor serves as one of the primary reminders that the story takes place on an alien world, and the narration periodically pauses to describe, often in considerable detail, the various glowing, oddly-colored, strangely-proportioned, mobile, or carnivorous plants, fungi, and slime molds of the planet.
  • The plateau lands are covered in much more alien flora than the relatively mundane lowland jungles, such as carpets of carnivorous ground cover, dense growths of spiky purple moss, crimson lichens, and ropy blue fungus.
  • In the norther highlands, many trees have luminous foliage, and certain types of fungi move around as crawling, slug-like detritus-eaters.
  • At Niagara Station, Seena has grown a large garden of plant life from across the planet, resulting in a surreal mixture of forms. As Gundersen crosses it to reach the station, the narration spends considerable time describing his passage through fleshy candle-like growths, plants with immensely enlarged fruit or stamens, writhing vines, shrubs with mobile leaves, and patches of carnivorous moss and jelly.
• Harry Potter: There are various fantastic plants, such as the mandrake roots that look like human beings and can kill people with their cry, the gillyweed, that helps Harry breathe underwater, and the plant Mimbulus Mimbletonia which Neville is given as a gift and brings to school. The Hogwarts curriculum dedicates a major class to studying magical flora.
• Inheritance Cycle: A group of spirits transforms a lily into precious metals, including a golden stem, silver-wire hairs, white gold petals, and other flower organs carved from rubies. Eragon and Arya discover that the metal flower is still alive, and Arya hypothesizes that it's also fertile and capable of producing seeds that might grow into more golden lilies, though this is never confirmed.
• The Mysterious Benedict Society: Unusual plants play a large part in the adventures, thanks in part to Sticky's particular talent for recognizing the obscure plants he's read about in his books.
  • In the first book, he discovers the traps on Nomansan Island thanks to them being hidden by drapeweed, a rare shade-loving type of ivy. Later, it's Sticky's having spotted a patch of "wild chuck-root" (Euphorbia upchucuanhae) that helps the group in their plans, when they use it to give a bellyache to everyone in the Institute so that Reynie and Sticky can get their turns in the Whisperer sooner.
  • The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey is focused largely around Mr. Benedict and his evil twin's attempts to acquire another rare plant, duskwort, which has the potential to cure their narcolepsy when mixed when other substances. In its normal form, however, it's an extremely potent plant that, when burned, releases smoke that can put entire villages to sleep, but it only thrives under very specific conditions. However, it it easily overtaken by thwart-wort, a clever mimic that looks just like it, but has none of the same useful chemical properties.
• Skylanders: The Mask Of Power: Hurrikazam owns the only known Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible, Suprising, Unfathomable, All-Coloured Rose in existence, a flower that is the deepest most vibrant red, before switching to deep vibrant blue, before yellow, and so on. As it turns out, it's so in-tune with life, the undead segment of the mask went into its seed.
• The Stormlight Archive: The world of Roshar is entirely dominated by the massive Highstorms, violent hurricanes which every few days scour the land to bare rock. In the face of this, Roshar's vegetation has become more analogous to coral or sea anenomes than terrestrial vegetation, extending leaves or tendrils when the weather is fair and then retracting them when danger threatens. For example, the main food grain of Roshar is something called lavis, which, instead of growing a head of grain the way terrestrial grain does, possesses a head-sized shell of stone-like substance within which the grains grow, suspended in a sand-like medium.
• The Thrawn Trilogy: The hallways of the New Republic's headquarters on Coruscant are lined with potted ch'hala trees with transparent bark that, when touched, flare with red ripples that move outward from the point of contact. This turns out to be plot relevant. It is the key to a recording device that detects sound waves using the same concept.

Live-Action TV

• Alien Worlds (2020)
  • Atlas is home to large fields of plants resembling floating green balloons tethered to the ground by think stalks.
  • Eden is covered in forests of red-leaved trees, some of them simply recolored dragon's blood trees, interspersed with plants somewhat resembling large jellyfish on stalks.
• Extraterrestrial (2005):
  • The swamps of Aurelia are dominated by animal-like trees with mobile roots, hearts, and red parasols instead of leafy canopies, over an understory of giant mushrooms.
  • The global forests of the Blue Moon consist chiefly of kilometer-tall, blue trees consisting of a tangled network of trunks topped by large bowls to catch rainwater, interspersed with balloon plants composed of a set of hydrogen-filled sacs attached to long tendrils stretching down to the forest floor.
• Groundling Marsh: In "Tinkletree Trouble", the Tinkletrees only bloom once in spring, and make wind chime-like noises when wind blows through them.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • "The Cage": Talos IV's surface is home to clusters of turquoise plants whose leaves emit eerie, almost singing sounds, which give the planet a distinctly alien atmosphere.
    • "The Man Trap": Sulu (then a botanist) is tending to a laboratory filled with specimens of alien flora. Most are simply vividly colored and bizarrely-shaped, but one alien flower is capable of limited movement and vocalizations and becomes agitated when a shapeshifting alien enters the room in the guise of a crewmember.
    • "This Side of Paradise": The plants on Omicron Ceti III produce spores that give good health and a sense of euphoria to the colonists who tend them, at the cost of human drive and ambition.
  • Star Trek: Voyager
    • "Survival Instinct": Captain Janeway is given a prehensile plant as a gift, and finds herself being grabbed by the hair when she goes to water it. Chakotay has to help pull her free.
    • Tuvok tends orchids as a hobby, including some alien varieties he picks up on his travels. This backfires in "Tuvix" when the plant he's beaming up to Voyager somehow makes him merge with Neelix.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • The filaments or styles ^note they look like styles, but one flower has at least two (there's only one style for each blossom), so they may be filaments of the orchids in Dahj's apartment move on their own.
    • Raffi grows a flowering plant called snakeleaf. When smoked, it induces paranoia.

Puppet Shows

• Donkey Hodie:
  • "Growing the Ungrowdenia" involves a flower called the Ungrowdenia which will grow to a huge size if watered repeatedly, but can be "ungrown" if needed.
  • In "A Lot of Hot!", Donkey obtains a massive lemon for the purposes of making lemonade, even though Duck Duck's plan calls for only one regular-sized lemon. It quickly becomes clear that there's no way she can use it - it's bigger than herself.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: Numerous magical plants exist, in addition to the game's roster of Plant People and carnivorous plants:
  • Eruphytes are plants that became hosts to minds or souls cast loose from their bodies or the afterlife, becoming intelligent, telepathic and possessed of Psychic Powers.
  • Rampant plants are ones that channelled the energies of the Positive Energy Plane and survived, transforming into fonts of unchecked growth — any regular plant within a mile of them starts to grow at three times its normal rate.
  • Sun orchids are incredibly rare desert flowers that can be used to distill the sun orchid elixir, which can restore any creature that drinks it to youthful vigor.
• World Tree (RPG): Plants are generally as likely to be magically active as animals, and several species exist that do things like power fire magic, produce cley, inhibit one's ability to sense magic, heal wounds and sicknesses, and so on. Other plants grow metal nuggets, stones precious and non, salt and other minerals in their leaves, stems, flowers, fruit and so on, which are often the only sources of these things on the Tree.

Video Games

• Beastieball: By trope definition, the various mushrooms count as this, growing practically anywhere and when picked, regrow immediately. One variety even suddenly springs from the ground and forms a net whenever an outdoor Beastieball match starts up.
• Bug Fables has several plants brought to life from the magic of crystals, usually seen in the form of enemies. The common Seedling family and the bug-eating Chomper family are the most recurring types of living plants.
• Dragon Blaze 2000: The forest level is filled with giant plants larger than the players' dragon steed, and loads and loads of plant-based enemies which can shoot their spores as attacks, from Foul Flower to Fungus Humongous and Venus flytraps that can spill bullets.
• Eternal Sonata has the Heaven's Mirror, a flower that hides in its buds during the daylight and releases it all in a brilliant display at exactly 2 A.M. in the morning, symbolic of the playable character Polka, and the time of death of the famous real-life composer and playable character Frederic Chopin. There's also the Simile flower, which only blooms with water from Simile Spring, but wilts if you water it with regular water.
• Final Fantasy XIII has plenty of this in the Yaschas Massif, with much of it looking like skyscraper sized grass and weeds, and vines and roots large enough to use as makeshift bridges.
• Grow: Song of The Evertree: All the biomes have different styles of plants, flowers, and bushes. While they're fairly normal-looking in nature and desert worlds, ice worlds have trees with crystal trunks; princess worlds have plants shaped like hearts, stars, and pillars; fungus worlds have mushrooms instead; and gross worlds' plants have eyes or mouths.
• Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life feature various fictional fauna such as Gemsoil flowers and Happy Lamp flowers.
• House Of The Dead III: The Sun, a genetically created plant.
• Kingdom Hearts: The Deep Jungle world has an area with flowers that change color depending on which spell is cast on them. They turn black if Heartless are nearby and disintegrate if they stay there. You also have to destroy a giant bluish fruit that was apparently attracting Heartless. Wonderland has flowers that drop improved items when given a specific item and plants that summon treasure chests when Thunder is cast on them. The series also has Heartless based on plants.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Multiple plants — voltfruit, numerous wildflowers, swift and endura carrots and fleet-lotus seeds — and various supernatural species of mushroom provide buffs when cooked into food, ranging from increased strength or physical energy to the ability to withstand elemental extremes.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: A number of new Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables are added to the lineup from Breath of the Wild. In addition, the Depths are covered in forests of alien flora to emphasize their alien nature. The most common plants there are patches of lilac grass and short trees with branches resembling peacock feathers. Towering over these are colossal, many-capped mushrooms and immense fern-like plants.
• Myst III: Exile: One of the Ages consists of a gigantic hollow tree which hosts loads of examples of this trope, including plants that act like ladders, sun-focusing lenses, water pipes, trapeze lines, and an elevator.
• Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition: The Lost Grove features bizarre plants with pulsating globular net structures that would be more at home in a sci-fi film such as Avatar.
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps: The Luma Pools area has fluorescent pink vegetation, which is quite a jarring contrast with the more mundane flora of the rest of the game.
• Pikmin series: There are a few bizarre plants on PNF-404, with the Pikmin themselves being part-plant creatures themselves. Candypop Buds in particular are giant (compared to the characters) flowers that are somehow capable of transforming the type of Pikmin thrown in.
• Psychonauts has several examples early on. Each stage — excluding the Hub Level — is a surreal Mental World tailored to a different character's personality, leading to oddities like a military-themed level with plants made from dogtags and barb wire.
• Shantae and the Pirate's Curse: The Cyclops Plant boss is a giant plant with "jaws" that houses and protects a large laser-shooting, slime-dripping eye ball that serves as its main body.
• Subnautica contains copious quantities of this. A mushroom-like species that's full of caustic acid, kelp with seedpods that can be rendered down into silicone rubber, floating blue spheres held to the seafloor by netlike clusters of roots, bulb-shaped trees containing isolated mini-biomes that are stated to die off if the plant is pierced, ghostly white reeds whose roots grow pustules that are filled with a blood-colored, benzene-containing fluid, and many other equally unusual examples populate the world of 4546B. And all bioluminescent, including the potatoes.
• Tales of Graces has the Sopheria flower, which Sophie is named after. When it blooms, its seeds glow a bright pink and rise into the air spontaneously.
• Tangle Tower: Fitz grows unusual plants in the greenhouse, including inedible gem-like fruit and exotic and even one-of-a-kind flowers. He attributes it to the unique properties of the lakewater around the manor. A major subplot involves a unique flower he bred to look exactly like Penny.
• Temtem: The world is filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful plants, such as glowing reeds shaped like question marks, and trees with spiralling trunks.
• Terraria has feiry plants that grow in the ash of the Underworld, trees made of stone and gems that grow underground, and variations of otherwise normal trees and plants when hit with any of the three "Infecting" Biomes. The Corruption turns trees in to "Ebonwood," the Crimson to "Shadewood," and the Hallow to "Pearlwood." Seven types of magic herbs can also be gathered that are used in potion making.
• Voyage Inspired By Jules Verne: The plants on the moon come in a variety of vibrant colours, and all seem to be predatory in nature, and quite hostile to anyone who approaches them. They also seem to be averse to certain types of each other, which the Selenites utilize to be able to walk among them without being attacked.
• Waking Mars is basically this trope: The Game. You as the player character grow and study increasingly unusual plant species in Lethe Cavern below the surface of Mars, though as your AI companion is quick to remind you, they're technically not plants.
• The Wolf and the Waves: Two of the ingredients the player character needs to craft the cure are a "titan stalk" and a "giant bloom" which are the same size as a human.

Web Original

• Serina:
  • Towertrees are massive trees of the sunflower lineage that have converged upon the niche of redwoods and grow their branches in a unique pattern resembling a spiral staircase.
  • The cementrees of the Hothouse Age are plants whose symbiotic ant colonies build mounds around them in order to protect the trees from thorngrazers and the like, heaping material until they reach maturity at forty feet tall. While initially simply made of clay, as the tree grows and the colony gets more established, the mound is further shored up by cellulose from dead plant matter nearby, clay, grains of sand, and ant feces, giving it the strength and durability of hempcrete. By the late Hothouse, the cementrees have further evolved to become massive structures known as sky islands, essentially terrestrial reefs comprised of thousands of trees that can range from separated groups only tens of feet wide to massive constructions that go for hundreds if not thousands of miles and go more than two miles above sea level. Even the individual trees of a sky island can get as tall as a skyscraper.
  • Clam daisies are ground-dwelling plants living 300 million years post-establishment that have evolved large, stone-like leaves to protect themselves against harmful UV radiation due to the destruction of Serina's magnetosphere, giving them their namesake appearance.
  • The wandering spiderweed of the longdark swamp 290 million years post establishment is a parasitic plant that is so thigmotactic that it's capable of climbing around — its old growth dies off and crumbles away at about the same rate that new leaves grow, wind about tree branches and harden, allowing the plant to very slowly move towards desirable stimuli and making it essentially biologically immortal.

Webcomics

• Homestuck:
  • John's planet, the Land of Wind and Shade, is home to stands of short, bioluminescent trees.
  • Alternia, the troll homeworld, has forests of immense trees with blue bark and pink leaves.

Western Animation

• Care Bears:
  • Both of the later incarnations, Adventures in Care-a-Lot and Welcome to Care-a-Lot have delicious bumbleberries.
  • Care Bears & Cousins: The jealouspikle junipers seen in "BFFs" are strange spiky purple bushes that grow when someone is feeling jealous. However, they feed off jealous energy and so if that person stops feeling jealous, they eventually go away entirely.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation: T.U.R.N.I.P.", the team fights a gigantic, tentacled, uh, turnip.
• The Dragon Prince: In "The Crown", the flora encountered in the Moonshadow Forest include musical lilies and foul-smelling "fart flowers".
• Dragon Tales has dragonberries, which all of the characters love eating. Also, Dragon Land is loaded with unusual plants in general — the third season story "A Small Victory" features all of the main characters (and guest Lorca) searching for unusual flowers. The plants seen on the page picture are dande-lions, which can roar like real lions but otherwise are basically just extremely large dandelions.
• Gravity Falls: In "The Land Before Swine", several characters end up in a cavern full of prehistoric life forms trapped in — and recently released from — amber. Soos examines one such life form, a group of pinkish flowers, which produces a powerful acrid smell.
  [happily] This little fella smells like battery acid!
  [the plant releases a cloud of dull yellow vapor into Soos' face with a coughing sound; Soos cringes]
  [equally happily] Looks like I lost my sense of smell. Ha ha ha!
• JoJo's Circus has merryberries, which JoJo is allergic to. Eating them causes her nose to swell and honk and her skin to turn pink and tingly. There's also the itchy ootchy scratch plants, which are basically a fast-acting fantastic flora version of poison ivy. When JoJo and Skeebo fall into a patch of these, they start itching all over.
• The Lone Ranger (1966) makes use of this in "Forest of Death", in which Tonto has to go after a mad botanist who wants to conquer the West with mutant plants he's bred. Some of the highlights include: lilies that release clouds of deadly poison when they open, a literal strangler vine, mangrove trees with hands on their roots that try to drown victims, cacti with instant-death poison on their needles that grow to maturity in seconds, lotuses that spit barbed dart-like seedpods (which grow into new lotuses within seconds of impact), and a giant, carnivorous flower that almost makes a meal out of Tonto. Ironically, the one plant experiment he failed at was his efforts to breed a Plant Person: his army of "treemen" turns out to be nothing but hired thugs in thick tree costumes.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Bridle Gossip": The "leaves of blue" Zecora tries to warn the Mane Six about turn out to be the source of their strange conditions in the second half of the episode. The leaves belong to a patch of Poison Joke, a plant which causes humorous, often ironic afflictions on those who come in contact with it.
  • "The Cutie Pox" features two: Heart's Desire is a plant with heart-shaped flowers that can, if eaten, grant someone their greatest desire. The Seeds of Truth are another flower that only grows when true words are spoken, and which can undo the effects of Heart's Desire.
  • "Family Appreciation Day": The older members of the Apple family are busy preparing to harvest Zap Apples, a magical variety of apple tree that only grows its rainbow-colored fruit, used to make Sweet Apple Acres' famous Zap Apple Jam, after a series of ominous signs (including a lightning storm and swarms of crows).
  • "Princess Spike": Dragon-sneeze trees grow large flowers that induce violent, fiery sneezing fits in dragons.
  • "A Health of Information": The plot is precipitated by the effects of a flowering tree whose pollen induces Swamp Fever, a sickness that begins with annoying but harmless effects (spotting and coughing up bubbles), develops more serious symptoms (sneezing out lighting bolts) and ultimately sees the afflicted person sprout branches and turn into another tree of the same species.
  • "Growing Up Is Hard to Do": Twilight and Fluttershy are studying a mysterious flower that can grant wishes, at the cost of needing to consume a petal for each wish granted.
• PB&J Otter: Numerous, including babbleberries, pompalopes, pompanuts and giggle melons. Most of these are just fantasy equivalents of real-world plants, but the giggle melons actually make you giggle when you eat them.
• The Save-Ums! has a couple in Wave World, including Wave Melons (which are like watermelons, only the inside is blue instead of pink) and Silly Sea Sammies (flowers resembling daisies that have faces and giggle).
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • Assuming the holodeck's rendition of the Adashake Center applies to the whole planet, Orion foliage is teal instead of green like on Earth, and the tree trunks are pink.
  • Most of the vegetation on the Galardonian homeworld is maroon, brown or purple, although there are some green plants. The tree trunks are either grey or blueish-grey, and there are green bulbs with grey spots growing on them.
  • On Tulgana IV, the brown Kitalia leaves contain a numbing agent, the trees at the park have blueish-purple leaves, and their trunks have purple protrusions.
  • "Moist Vessel": Alien vegetation grows all over the Cerritos and the Merced as the ships are being terraformed.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • The surface of Saleucami is dominated by forests of coral-like plants in tapering, conifer-like shapes and tall, horsetail-like stems. In "The Deserter", a farm on the planet grows fields of giant purple flowers and plants with leafless stems ending in rounded bulbs.
  • The swamps of Dathomir are dominated by trees whose trunks grow as gnarled and branchless arcs from whose tips dangle large red pods hanging from long, thin tendrils.
  • "Nomad Droids": Pattitite Pattuna is dominated by tall trees each topped with a pair of perforated, shell-like leaves, floating clusters of reddish lumps trailing long roots into the air, and wide fields of "grass" with stems dotted with pink, lilac and blue globes.
  • Umbara's surface is blanketed by strange plants with leafless, twisting stems dotted with luminescent patches.
  • Onderon is covered by jungles of trees with light purple leaves and cyan trunks.
• ToddWorld: "Garden Variety Pickle" features the kids in the main cast and Todd's dog Benny making an abandoned lot into a garden. They plant things like glitter flowers, which can eat rocks, and a tree with several different types of dog biscuits. None of these, however, are the focus of the story. This instead goes to a small scraggly weed with no unusual properties that Pickle is caring for because he finds it beautiful, the story having An Aesop about respecting how different things are beautiful to different people.

Real Life

• There have been studies to guess the color of the pigments used for photosynthesis that alien plants could have depending of what kind of star their planets would be orbiting. Planets orbiting hotter stars than the Sun would have plants of red, orange, and yellow colors and those around cooler ones would have plants of darker colors, up to and including black.

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