Garden of Evil

Salazar: So Mr. Kennedy, do you like my garden?
Leon: I see you've been able to work in some of your twisted taste, here, too.

— Resident Evil 4

A Garden of Evil is a distinctly unpleasant place to be, where all forms of life within are poisonous, corrupted, and extremely deadly. Often populated by sinister research (scientific or magical) experiments run amok, the garden can also serve as a protective barrier for a villain's lair. This is the plant life of Mordor. There is probably a Hedge Maze — quite possibly mobile. The place may be under a Curse. Very likely to be home to a Botanical Abomination.

Scale can vary greatly. A common type of Death World consists entirely of this. In instances where the garden grows, expect The End of the World as We Know It. See The Hedge of Thorns, When Trees Attack and Lost in the Maize. Plant Mooks, Alien Kudzu, a Man-Eating Plant and Meat Moss can often be found growing here. No relation to the Garden of Sinners. Contrast Last Fertile Region, Garden of Love, and Garden of Eden (usuallly). And for a more metaphorical interpretation, see Weeding Out Imperfections, where "desirable" and "undesirable" people are compared to flowers and weeds.

---

Examples

Anime and Manga

• Avesta of Black and White: There exists the aptly named Garden of Bloodshed Baliga which is the residence of a group of beings known as the Man-Murdering Demons. As if the residents of the garden wasn't bad enough, the whole garden itself carries the evil alignment meaning that if you are aligned with good then even the plants will be out to get you.
• Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories: The manga adaptation has Marluxia lure our heroes into his Garden of Evil as opposed to going One-Winged Angel as in the game.
• King of Thorn: The entire setting is one of these: a monster-filled jungle of rapidly growing thorny vines.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind:
  • Almost the entire world appears to be covered in an ever-growing forest that releases a deadly miasma that kills in a single breath, victims often ejecting fountains of blood from their mouths. To add to this, the forest is protected by often aggressively territorial insects the size of houses. Nausicaa secretly grows forest plants on pure water to find that it's not the plants themselves that are poisonous, it's the polluted soil they are growing in. The end of the manga reveals that the plants were genetically modified Just Before the End to purify the soil.
  • In the manga there is also an utopic garden, where the forest has finished purifying the land, that turns out to be a Garden of Evil because humans can no longer survive in such clean air, their lungs having become adapted to the polluted atmosphere.
• Toriko: Death Season Forest had its name for a reason. You see, every fall comes with a cloud of fog that just happens to be toxic enough that three seconds of exposure will stop your heart. With winter comes blizzards of -200 Celsius and freezing winds that rip up the razor blade-like grass of the Forest. During summer, the forest floor disappears under a carpet of lava, and the surface temperature spikes to a degree where being close will give you burns. Finally, there is spring, a relatively 'easy' season where all you have to worry about are hordes of Monsters with a capture level average of 60. Oh, and a Level 5 creature can tear apart modern tanks with their bare hands. So, have fun!
• Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel: A promotional poster uses this trope to depict Sakura's Sanity Slippage. The garden is beautiful, but walled in, and a black grass-killing poison is oozing towards the blank-eyed girl in the center. A poster for the last installment depicts her and Shirou leaving the greenhouse, hand-in-hand.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Downplayed, but both the Simic Combine and the Golgari Swarm of Ravnica produce these. The Simic Combine's "parks" are open-air labs full of bio-engineered plants and animals, almost all of which are deadly, as they continually experiment with pushing evolution to new heights. The Golgari's rot-farms and dripping jungles are a grosser version, typically full of Festering Fungi (which are often mobile, aggressive, hallucinogenic, acid-spitting, carnivorous, or any combination thereof), Big Creepy-Crawlies, zombies, and combinations thereof.
  • The Selesnya Conclave subverts it at first glance, but ultimately plays it straight. The paradisaical gardens where every inhabitant and creature seemingly lives in harmony will instantly turn on an outsider as one singular angry organism, with the very garden itself coming to life to attack you if you prove too resilient.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! gives us the "Black Garden" card, which turns battles into strange fights of attrition. Summoned monsters get their ATK points halved, and a plant token is summoned to the opposite side of the field when a monster is summoned.

Comic Books

• Batman: Poison Ivy tends to constantly be making these to serve as bases for her eco-terroist operations.
• Judge Dredd: In "The Torture Garden", Judge Death feels inspired by the French novel of the same name to build his own "torture garden", consisting of horrific statues made out of human corpses, vines growing out of rotting brains, and flowers that seep blood.
• Sensation Comics: Wonder Woman saves an odd crippled Crusty Caretaker who seems nice enough (if abrasive and rude) and who shows her some of the marvelous flowers that he's been able to cultivate in his eerie greenhouse, including unsettling flowers that look like women's faces — she gets tripped by something he hides and then claims was a withered branch on her way out. He later shows his true colors when he reveals the Man Eating Plants which tried to nab her on her first visit.

Fairy Tales

• The deadly hedge of thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle.

Fan Works

• The Assassins' Guild in the Discworld is expanded on in the fics of A.A. Pessimal. The story Murder Most 'Orrible introduces Doctor Davinia Bellamy, who becomes Botany Teacher at the Guild School. Her preferred means of servicing the needs of the client involves the language of flowers, which inevitably say Drop Dead! in a variety of elegant ways. Her attitude to gardening involves planting interesting hedgerow and verge plants to mark the boundaries of her property and using pot-plants such as the Apache Hospitality Cactus and a bonsai version of the Pyramid Strangler Vine ^note Bonsai is a matter of scale. She has scaled a plant that can grow three hundred feet tall and occupy an area of several hundred square yards down to a more manageable eight feet or so as security systems in her florist shop. Her garden is marked with interesting and decorative border plants such as the Hergenian Ironthorn with its long stilleto thorns, the Astoria Trailing Creeper that deals with things like snails, slugs and rats, Catbite^note A plant that thinks catnip is for wimps, Lancre Thistles, and nettles that deliver a more painful rash. The Guild of Thieves warns its members about Bellamy-designed gardens. "Do not go there" sums up the warning.
• Child of the Storm has the surroundings and innards of Project Pegasus as this, with Doctor Lake, a former employee, describing in loving detail how bad the ordinary plants are - all Real Life examples of horrifying plant life. The magical and magically altered examples are exponentially worse, with Cordyceps zombies infectious enough to overwhelm Deadpool's monstrously powerful Healing Factor being just the start. And that's not even getting into the things living in it. As Strange hammers home, even in a more or less dormant state, even avoiding the worst, even accounting for the fact that it was scoured of its very worst by Alan Scott, it is still a magically bioengineered weapons factory of nightmares. This is emphasised by the fact that Scott barely managed to seal it and had to leave his Lantern behind to keep it shut - the rough equivalent of Thor leaving Mjolnir behind to hold something shut. Ever since, it's been a cautionary tale not to mess with magic. A great deal of this is explained by the fact that the project had been infiltrated by Nimue, an extremely skilled Earth-mage who'd been Brought Down to Badass and whose idea of regaining power involved creating her own version of the Lantern by cracking open the planet. The sheer magical overspill overclocked everything and turned it into a nightmare.

Films — Animated

• The Other World's garden in Coraline becomes one, where the previously-whimsical plants turn on Coraline once the Other World is revealed to be more of a nightmare than a fantasy.
• The hedge of thorns conjured by Maleficent in Disney's Sleeping Beauty.

Films — Live-Action

• The Æon Flux movie features a biotech security system that includes human-detecting razor grass and what appeared to be machine-gun seedpods?
• Jumanji: There are two. One has a prehensile tongue-like vine that can pull people towards its mouth where it presumably plans to eat them. The vine has enough strength to fold a police car. The second variant are purple flowers that shoot out poisonous barbs.
• Isla Nublar from Jurassic Park is an example both in the book and the movie: lush, tropical vegetation, well-kept park infrastructure and lots of dinosaurs. Mostly of the carnivorous kind.
• Most of Labyrinth is set in one of these, albeit a PG-rated one where the traps and flora incapacitate you (or make you smell really, really bad) rather than kill. Except "the Cleaners."
• Minority Report has a greenhouse of evil, filled with dangerous plants which also move. Subverted in that the owner is a benign but disconnected researcher and one of the hero's temporary allies. Amusingly enough, she also has to supply an antidote to said hero after he gets stung on the neck by one of her prize plants.
• Twice-Told Tales: In "Rappaccini's Daughter", Giacomo Rappaccini keeps his daughter Beatrice in a garden full of toxic plants. Rappaccini has treated Beatrice with an exotic plant extract that makes her touch as deadly as that of the plants in the garden; he does this to keep her safe from unwanted suitors, but it makes her a prisoner in her own home.
• The poppy field in The Wizard of Oz (which was also in the book).

Literature

• In the Apprentice Adept novels, the Orange Adept has power over plant life, so uses this trope for defense of the Orange Demesnes.
• Young-adult fantasy adventure novel Blade Of The Poisoner]] features a deadly garden in the realm of a tyrant obsessed with poisons and entropy.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: One of the effects of the Sunbane in The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is to turn a country into this, every few days (with the intervening days being filled up by desert, rainstorms and pestilence, at random).
• In Circle of Magic, Briar and his teacher Rosethorn have plant magic — anyplace you happen to piss them off can easily become a Garden of Evil, provided there's any plant life at all — and they often pack their own. For example, when the temple city where they live has to fight off a pirate attack, their contribution involves tying up the seeds of thorny, viny plants into packages, launching them onto the beach, and giving them a huge rush of magic to make them grow ultra-fast. The resulting tangle of plants is so high and thick that they can't even see the strangled, bleeding pirates underneath. Lady Zenadia from Street Magic has a different sort of Garden of Evil. How does she manage such lush courtyards in the middle of a desert city? She uses the corpses of teenage gang members as fertilizer.
• Princess Amanita maintains one in Dangerously Ever After, including deadly poisons and explosive grenapes. The book follows her attempt to acquire roses, valued for their thorns.
• Derk's garden in Dark Lord of Derkholm has some elements of this (ex., carnivorous flowers) in its natural state, being the playground of a wizard who specializes in Mix-and-Match Critters. When forced to play the role of Evil Overlord for a series of tour groups, he disguises it to look the part as well.
• Much of the Labyrinth from The Death Gate Cycle is like this. The rest is more like Mordor. All of it is absolutely deadly.
• Probably the ultimate example comes from Deathworld. Due to a misunderstanding, the very peculiar wildlife on the titular planet has altered itself to wage war against humanity, changing to the point where even every blade of grass has a venomous claw dangling from it.
• Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz has the Land of the Mangaboos. It appears to be a pleasant underground garden with living plants described as The Beautiful Elite. But in reality, the race is xenophobic, violent and irredeemably evil, and the party must flee for their lives when the race decides to murder them for no reason.
• In Clark Ashton Smith's "The Garden of Adompha", the King and his evil sorcerer have one such garden walled off in the palace for their own private use, wherein they graft human organs to the plants. Well until the King decides to kill his companion and bury him in the selfsame garden. It doesn't end well.
• In The Genocides, aliens gradually transform Earth so that their uncanny, tree-like Plants cover the entire land surface. Doing away with the human race makes this project easier to complete.
• The Giver Quartet: The forest in Gathering Blue and Messenger is sentient and selective of the people it wants passing through. Don't push your luck.
• The arena of the 50th Hunger Games in The Hunger Games was a veritable Garden of Eden so beautiful most of the Tributes were too surprised to move when the Games started. However, it proved to be one of these soon enough — everything, from the water to the trees to the scent of the flowers, was poisonous.
• Octave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices (The Torture Garden) might be a possible candidate for Ur-Example here, as it was first published in 1899.
• In Life of Pi, Pi lands on an "island" floating in the Pacific, consisting of algae and trees in symbiosis... which turns out to be carnivorous. The scene where he peels away layers of leaves from what he thinks is a fruit, and finds a human tooth in the middle, is horrific.
• The home of the sea witch of The Little Mermaid is surrounded by hostile seaweed. When the protagonist swims through the first time, she spots the corpse of another mermaid that was captured by the plants and killed.
• In Miserere: An Autumn Tale, the Rosa is this — without the evil. It's in fact a good force capable of destroying the evil and sparing the good. Still scares the good guys; Lucian forbids Lindsey to touch the human-faced flowers.
• Probably quite a few gardens in Nightside. The best-known is the runaway garden/jungle in front of the Griphon estate. Some of the places on the other sides of timeslips also count.
• "Rappaccini's Daughter" features an early poisonous garden created by a mad scientist — and his daughter is the only one who can survive to walk in it, because she's been engineered to be just as poisonous as all of the plants.
• the secret lives of Princesses: The Night Princess has a greenhouse of carnivorous plants.
• The Shannara series has a few; among them, there's the Maelmord from The Wishsong of Shannara, the living forest on Shatterstone in The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, and the living garden protecting the Black Elfstone in First King of Shannara.
• In The Shining, the garden of the Overlook Hotel has intelligent, evil topiary animals that moved only when you weren't looking.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has this as the Glade's most common incarnations, including a hostile forest of liquid flesh, and an endless, foggy hedge maze covered in blood.
• The Garden of the Ziggurat in Spectral Stalkers is filled with beautiful crystal flowers which are actually sentient, capable of spitting deadly acid at intruders, as well as dangerous Silica Serpents.
• The Things They Carried: One character — after watching a fellow soldier, recently unhinged by seeing his best friend blown to bits by an extremely powerful booby trap, systematically torture an unresisting baby water buffalo by shooting pieces off of it before finally killing it — explicitly invokes the trope.
  "Well, that's 'Nam," he said. "Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original."
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • In Lord of the Rings (book and film), the Morgul Vale and the Dead Marshes are exactly such a place, with poisonous flowers, glowing undead pools, etc.
  • It's not a cultivated garden, but The Silmarillion has Nan Dungortheb (the Valley of Dreadful Death), which is the reason why a Hidden Elf Village like Doriath needs powerful warriors.
• Trash of the Count's Family has the Forest of Darkness, where every day is a fight for survival because everything tries to kill you, plant and animal alike. It's also home to a poison swamp and is the only place on the continent that has monsters.
• In the Uglies world, vast swaths of the (presumed American) wilderness have become a desert, and what isn't desert is taken over by the "white weed". The protagonist is told that the weed is a species of orchid that was very rare and very expensive, and scientists genetically modified the flower to grow faster and healthier. It soon became so invasive that it choked out all other forms of plant life and ruined the soil.

• Uprooted: The Wood is a forest filled with monsters that carry The Corruption, Heart Trees that are made from kidnapped villagers, and a Genius Loci that wants to Kill All Humans.
• Warhammer 40,000 Expanded Universe:
  • The Gaunt's Ghosts novel Traitor General has the Untill (short for "untillable"). Canopy so thick that night and day are the same, filled with giant insects, including poisonous moths so lethal that just brushing against them can mean horrible, painful death. Despite the hideous danger, it is still survivable: the Nihtgane have set up a stable and functioning civilization there, having developed an immunity to the local toxins.
  • In the Horus Heresy novel False Gods, on Davin's moon, the battlefield having been transformed from a hot, dry forest to foggy marsh, it also contains hordes of walking corpses. However, it does get better after the death of the Load-Bearing Boss.
  • In the Space Wolf novel Wolf's Honour, the crops of the shadow world look like corn, but every leaf has a human face, screaming, and pleading for release. What's worse, the Space Wolves can not stop to burn them; they will need the weapons that can do it. The Inquisitor explains this as the sacrifices to make the world.
• The Wheel of Time: The Blight is a continent-spanning rainforest situated past the northern fringes of civilization, filled with ancient biological experiments. Trees scream and attack animals that walk beneath, and everywhere are deadly creatures not even mages (or even the Dark One's own minions, often enough) dare face. Somewhere beyond it is the Dark One's lair. References to its accelerating expansion are made throughout the series, as a sign that the Last Battle is approaching. In the second book, it is said that the Blight has retreated a few hundred meters, implied to be a result of a major victory by the protagonists in the first book — it didn't last.
• Ernst Stavro Blofeld, under the alias "Doctor Shatterhand", has one of these in the grounds of a Japanese castle in You Only Live Twice. It becomes popular as a place for disgraced Japanese to seek an honourable end.

Live-Action TV

• In the Doctor Who serial "The Seeds of Doom", the estate of mad botanist Harrison Chase is turned into one of these as the flora falls under the control of the Krynoid.
  • Also "The Screaming Jungle" from "The Keys of Marinus". The forest was biologically altered by Darrius in an experiment on speeding up the growth process of flora. The experiments made the flora move. It also seemed to have been made sentient. The flora could kill individuals by constriction. It was also strong, capable of breaking down walls. The flora emitted a loud screaming noise.
• The serial killer in episode 2 of Hannibal buries his victims alive and grows mushrooms on their bodies with the help of sugar-solution IV drips.
• Once Upon a Time / Once Upon a Time in Wonderland: The Queen of Hearts's living hedge maze, where the walls devour anyone who gets close.

Music

• The eponymous garden on the cover of Dimmu Borgir's Godless Savage Garden◊ EP.
• Cans's album Beyond the Gates, contains a track (number 7) with this trope as its title.
• Vocaloid's Fear Garden. Nightmare-inducing.
• John Zorn's album "Torture Garden" (1990) with Naked City references Octave Mirbeau's "The Torture Garden" in its title.

Tabletop Games

• Deadlands: Lost Colony: On the planet Banshee in the Faraway System, fully one-quarter of the largest landmass is filled with a Garden of Evil aptly named the "Toxic Jungle." Virtually everything there is poisonous to creatures not native to the biome, and it's even home to the odd "Rex". Hell on Earth didn't get off easy, either: back on Earth, most of the infamously-damp coastal areas in Washington State have become a home-grown Garden of Evil, complete with the requisite Man Eating Plants.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dragonlance: The Shoikan Grove teems with undead creatures and plant monsters, and gives off a powerful aura of fear that can panic anybody who steps in unprotected.
  • The Abyss has every kind of horrible hellscape imaginable, so of course it has some of these too. Several of the plane's layers are covered in dense jungles, and because this is the Abyss every living thing in them (yes, every living thing) hates all life and especially you.
  • Elder Evils: Parts of Ragnorra's worldskin become covered by tangles of overgrown, malformed plant life, heavy with bulbous fruit, many of which were living creatures overwhelmed by surges in positive energy and turned into plants.
  • Ravenloft: Hazlik, one of the less-prominent darklords, has grown one of these to defend his residence. Another short Ravenloft adventure concerned an ermordenung who used a hedge-maze Garden of Evil to lure victims.
• Exalted:
  • Each cardinal direction is ruled by a certain element. To the east is the elemental pole of wood, and the farther from the center of the world you get, the more powerful the elemental pole's effect is. Go too far, and plants basically take over reality and do whatever they want.
  • There are also Gethamane's fungus gardens — the gardens themselves are fine, and actually vital to the function of the city, but the magic that fuels them got messed up at some point. People who spend too much time there (like, say, the farmers who work in them) slowly become convinced they require human sacrifices to keep working. They don't, but there's a lot of accidental deaths on the job that somehow wind up with the victim naked, castrated, and with veins sliced very precisely so the blood will drain out easily anyway.
• Pathfinder (2010): Overexposures of positive energy, the source of life and growth, can easily turn even barren countryside into thick, tangled jungles of over-fecund growth. The Tyrant's Grasp adventure path sees the creation of a lot of these when the Whispering Tyrant devises a weapon that obliterates targets in explosions of positive energy, seeding Lastwall with thickets of tangled vegetable growth, carnivorous plants and hideously mutated animals. The worst of these spots is the one created when he blasted his way free of his prison — named Gallowgarden, the resulting jungle of slimy, writhing vines, tumorous plants, moaning trees and misshapen beasts stands in stark contrast to the barren and undead-haunted landscape of the rest of the lich's realm, but is no less deadly to visit.
• Rocket Age: The entirety of Venus in is terrifying. If the wildlife doesn't get you, the plant life will. If the plant life doesn't get you, the diseases will. If the diseases don't get you, the terrain and weather will probably do you in.
• Vampire: The Masquerade:
  • Some members of the Nosferatu clan have taken up gardening fungus. Though these aren't necessarily lethal, security-conscious Nosferatu can make them so; these mushrooms gardens can be acidic, poisonous, hallucinogenic, the size of trees, and often swarming with any number of the ghouled creatures the Nosferatu like to keep in the warrens. Occasionally, some of the fungus are actually mobile as well...
  • The Lasombra warlord Caridad de Flores has one of her own in Mexico by Night, easily recognized by the weird silver-and-black flowers sprouting from the corpses of Caridad's victims. This garden is also a drug crop producing an exotic variety of highly addictive plantlife, and many of the garden's inhabitants (living or dead) are actually addicts who turned up for a fix one night and never left.
• Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000:
  • The realm of the Chaos God Nurgle is said to look like a rotting garden filled with various poisonous plants and nasty diseases.
  • The entire planet of Catachan is a (possibly sentient) Hungry Jungle so dangerous surviving past ten is an achievement. Includes wildlife like carnivorous plants that eat people, scorpions the size of a bus, and a toad that, when disturbed, explodes. With a kilometer-wide blast radius.
  • Rogue Trader: The adventure "Soul Reaver" features a deathworld garden in the spires of the Dark Eldar nobles. They occasionally run games where slaves are released into the garden and invariably get killed by the deadly plants. The players can enter the garden themselves to use the secret entrance to the Archon's palace hidden there.
  • In the realm of Slaanesh, the fifth circle to their palace is a garden filled with beautiful flowers with large thorns. Anyone caught in them is forever tangled by the thorns.

Theme Parks

• The theme of Busch Gardens' Howl-O-Scream event in 2011 and 2012, "The Dark Side of the Gardens", revolved around a creepy supernatural garden filled with evil plants and many hordes of zombies.

Video Games

• Episode Four (The Truth) of Alan Wake has this, when Alan is escaping from the Cauldron Lake Lodge. Part of that escape involves making your way through a garden (complete with hedge maze) filled with Taken, since the direct route to Alan's friend Barry (and Barry's car) is blocked by a locked gate.
• Ashes: Afterglow has the J. G. Ballard Botanical Gardens in the Badlands. in the Old World it was just a normal botanical garden, but after it, radiation and water contamination turned the sealed dome into a Hungry Jungle full of highly aggressive Plant Mooks.
• Dark Eden from Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is an unnatural domed garden created in the northern reaches of Nosgoth by three of its corrupted Guardians as a playground for their experimentations, referred to by Kain as "a garden of horrors, seeded with sick perversion of nature’s design." It's even dangerous to a vampire, as almost everything there has poisonous green blood that Kain can't drink.
• In Brain Dead 13, the hedge maze is a garden that is full of vines that pull you into the deadly bushes. Some even rip your entire skeleton off your body!
• Many Castlevania games feature a garden/courtyard level.
  • The Garden of Madness from Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow features creepy Lovecraftian plants in the background and plant-based monsters in the foreground. There's even a Skeleton Gardener to tend all of them.
  • Castlevania: Bloodlines featured a corrupted garden as part of the Versailles Palace stage. There's even a fountain that turns from water to blood as you walk through it.
  • Castlevania: Lament of Innocence had a garden but it was mostly on the inside with random plant enemies due to engine limitations.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had the Underground Garden - but only on the No Export for You Sega Saturn version.
• The whole surface world of Caves of Qud qualifies. As a post-apocalyptic game inspired by Gamma World, you naturally expect the ruins to be infested with mutants and remnant killbots. But even Qud's jungles and caves are full of life (plant and animal both) who want to do bad things to you. The Banana Grove in particular is notorious for having trees that will eat you alive where you stand hidden casually next to the actual fruit trees.
• The finale of vanilla Destiny takes place in the Black Garden, a Place Before Time where the game's two main deities, the Gardener and the Winnower, played a version of Conways Game Of Life using flowers, eventually the Gardener became tired of the game, due to the endless endgame repeating patterns and decided to add them both as a new rule, birthing the universe as we know it. It was subsequentially taken over by the Vex. Being in the Black Garden will cause everything to grow at abnormal rates, be that fingernails, hair, or the many many plants that inhabit the place, it is removed from normal time-space and is said that there time flows backwards, it now has been taken over by endless stretches of the Vex's hyper-complex machinery that has been overgrown with vines, grasses, and red flowers. And at the heart of it is the Black Heart, a fragment of The Darkness that a the Vex could not comprehend, which let to a now considered heretical subsect of their ranks, know as the Sol Divisive and decided to worship as a god. It has also appeared many other times in the games since, both in strikes in the original Destiny and the Garden of Salvation raid in it's sequel.
• Vault 22 in Fallout: New Vegas is over-run by mutated plants. One of the music pieces in this area is appropriately titled "Garden of Evil".

• The Plant Stages in the Gradius series.
• Hollow Knight has Greenpath, an overgrown ruin that has hedges of thorns and pools of bubbling acid in many parts, and is populated by various nasties hiding in the bushes. Nearby is the Queen's Gardens, which since the fall of Hallownest have been overgrown by similar thorny vines and populated by the Mantis Traitors, who are Zombie Infectee members of their tribe that have been exiled from the Mantis Village in Fungal Wastes.
• Kingdom of Loathing has a lot of these.
  • The Naughty Sorceress' hedge maze.
  • The Landscaper's Lair, temporarily available from an item sold at Uncle P's antiques, is a well-tended garden... that's tended by a demon and is full of killer lawn gnomes.
  • The Red Queen's Garden, if you can find and go down the rabbit hole in the Nearby Plains.
• Peach's Castle Garden, a late-game dungeon in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, is the exterior area of Peach's Castle after being taken over by Fawful. Mario and Luigi are forced to navigate the courtyard and find an entrance to the castle itself while dealing with monsters and puzzles along the way.

• The Prince praises the beauty of the Island Of Time's gardens in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and compares them to those of his homeland, but is quick to point out "However the gardens of Persia are not home to monsters".
• The garden of Castle Salazar in Resident Evil 4, which was a hedgemaze full of mutant, Thing-inspired wolves called Colmillos.
• In RosenkreuzStilette, Iris Sepperin's second stage is one of these, and to make matters worse, it has gravity flip traps.
• The entirety of Planet's surface in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, depending on your point of view.
• Secret of Evermore's final level, Omnitopia, features a Greenhouse of Evil containing a particularly nasty monster appropriately named the "Flowering Death." This fiend is near-invincible, and inflicts 999 damage on the hero should he be unfortunate enough to get too close when the greenhouse lights are on.
• World 7 of Super Mario Bros. 3 is filled with Piranha Plants and their relatives.
• Terraria has the Underground Jungle (and to an extent, the Corruption Biome) which are filled with plantlife and animals that are actively trying to horribly murder you, given the chance.
• The penultimate stage where you confront Morgana in Wild Blood is her garden, and it's infested with assorted monsters as well as Plant Mooks.
• World of Warcraft:
  • About a dozen different areas qualify, but the Eastern Plaguelands are probably the best example; a whole zone infested with The Undead and covered in orange mist, where most wildlife is either dying or diseased and the plants appear to be mutating into giant fungi.
  • The east wing of Dire Maul is an old elvish garden that's become tainted by the demons who since moved in, and where all the plants will now try to strangle or poison you.
  • In a more Garden-y variety, you also have The Botanica from The Burning Crusade, essentially a giant greenhouse full of dangerous botanical experiments run rampant, and Freya's Conservatory from Wrath of the Lich King.
  • The whole of Gorgrond is an enormous jungle filled with mutated plants and a race of Plant People mad geneticists, complete with a marsh of cursed mushrooms with Mind Control powers. The worst part is the Everbloom, an outdoor "dungeon" where the party races to stop a Genesaur from escaping through a portal into Stormwind.
  • Northern Val'sharah in the Broken Isles is a (literally) Nightmarish twisted jungle of horrible creatures spilling out from the Legion invading the Emerald Dream. The Darkheart Thicket and the Emerald Nightmare are the corresponding dungeon and raid.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series: Pamela Isley's privately owned greenhouse in her debut episode "Pretty Poison." It features a Trap Door hidden pit of overgrown, razor sharp cacti and a giant, carnivorous flytrap with python strength tendrils it uses to ensnare it's prey.
• In Rose Petal Place, Nastina's side of the garden is thorny and nasty, and her castle is a tin can fortress.
• The South Park episode "Rainforest Shmainforest" portrayed the jungles of Costa Rica as this. It leads the boys to decide that maybe deforestation isn't so bad after all.

Real Life

• Australia.
  • To be more precise, Australia's brush is home to extraordinarily dangerous venomous animals, including the death adder, the Sydney Funnelweb spider, bulldog ants, and green ants, with the very least of them being merely agonizingly painful. In particular, green ants often infest suburban lawns, thereby making mowing the grass life-threatening.
  • Even worse are the Indonesian-Australian stinging nettles of the genus Dendrocnide, often known as "stinging trees," or "stingers." All three species have large leaves covered with venomous, silica-tipped stinging hairs that can cause painful rashes that can sometimes last for months. There are numerous cases of humans, dogs and horses dying from being stung by the giant stinging tree and gympie stinger species.
• Ilha da Queimada Grande, home to five of the most venomous snakes in the world per square meter.
• The Alnwick Garden in the UK has a special section that consists entirely of poisonous plants, some of which are common garden plants. They even have a special licence to have coca and marijuana plants on display. Website here. The gate leading to the Poison Gardens carries a simple message in large letters "These Plants can Kill". And boy do they mean it.
• Blackberry hedges. Blackberries are great, clipping them is not...
  • Especially when they are overgrown with stinging nettles after some years of neglect.
• Poison ivy can be quite pretty in season, when its reddish hues are clearest, and spreads quickly into disturbed habitats such as neglected gardens.

---