Plant Aliens

"An intellectual carrot... the mind boggles."

— The Thing from Another World

Aliens aren't just made of meat. Whether dumb, talkative or even singing, plant-based aliens have been a staple of movies, films and TV for decades. There are even a few based on fungi, which are just as sessile, despite being very different from plants. They're actually much more closely related to animals, but if you've got walking talking mushrooms, why worry about a little thing like that?

On a side note, plant aliens are nearly always mobile and/or sentient, traits that pretty much defeat the point of belonging to a kingdom whose feeding methods do not rely on looking for other organisms to eat (and raises the question where they get all the extra energy from). Then again, what can you expect from Fantastic Flora?

May cross over with Plant Mooks if the characters are treated as disposable cannon fodder. Compare Plant Person, Planimal, and Botanical Abomination. See also Alien Kudzu, which may or may not be a plant.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Captain Harlock: The Mazone are plant-based alien women, blue like Zhaan from Farscape, though they share the long hair of most female Leiji Matsumoto characters.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend have Doraemon and friends being taken to Planet Green, populated by sentient, living plants. Unfortunately, these aliens are hostile and intends to drop a green nuke on earth to convert our planet into a green world like theirs.
• Dragon Ball Z: They're never directly identified as plants, but the green-skinned Namekians don't eat any kind of food and drink only water, because they get everything else they need for nourishment from photosynthesis. Physically, they're more like slug-people.
• Galaxy Angel has used a few strange alien plants; the usually serious games and manga are also not immune to the occasional sentient plant biting Mint's ears. They usually, however, Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" and end up with regular "space roses" and the like.
• Naruto: The Ten-Tailed Beast is a blood-drinking, life force-draining alien tree worshipped as a god. And that was before Kaguya Ōtsutsuki — a human alien — fused with it to become the Ten-Tailed Beast.
• Sonic X has the Dying Race of plant aliens, who play an important part in Season 3. The notable members include Cosmo and the Metarex.
• In Outlaw Star there's a sapient cactus that can control people's actions by vibrating its quills.
• To Love Ru has Celine, a giant sentient friendly Man-Eating Plant that lives in Rito's back yard. After she (apparently) becomes ill, Rito and company travel to an entire planet of hostile Plant Aliens in search of a cure. Turns out Celine was just entering her next biological stage: a little girl with a flower growing out of her head. Momo has an entire collection of these she can summon through her phone at anytime.
• Transformers: ★Headmasters: In one episode, Scorponok used Daniel to sneak seeds of giant man eating plants to San Francisco and the Autobots' Athenia base. Said plants later uprooted themselves and walked around, making them true plant aliens.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, one of the alien Neo-Spacians who follow Judai around in Spirit form is Glow-Moss, which is a Plant-Type on its card.

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons episode 3 is about a flower alien landing on Earth and befriending the goats. Wolffy tries to get the flower alien to capture the goats for him so that he can cook and eat them.

Comic Books

• The Avengers: The Cotati are intelligent, telepathic alien trees, and originally pretty inoffensive, responding to the Skrulls' challenge to create something in the Blue Area of the Moon by making a garden so beautiful it outshone the Kree's competing city. The Kree did not take this well. Eventually, in Empyre, they got sick of being everyone's whipping boys and demonstrated a previously well-hidden dark side.
• Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire: The most powerful, terrifying alien in the galaxy (so much so that he has a private teleportation system for getting around and a pocket-sized black hole trash can, and on his lonesome several levels on power ladder higher than the human species as a whole) is Lord Thezmothete. Thezmothete's right-hand-entity is He-Who-Must-Be-Watered, who looks like a large arrangement of exotic flowers in a hovering bowl.
• Deep Gravity: When Drummond is informed that the animal-like lifeforms he's looking at can photosynthesize, he's surprised and asks if they're plants. He's told that "animal" and "plant" aren't really valuable biological distinctions for things from a completely different planet; they could be called plant aliens, but that's just applying Earth terminology to things that don't really follow Earth rules.
• Guardians of the Galaxy: Groot is a humanoid alien tree.
• Paperinik New Adventures: The Evronians, who first come to life as large fungus-like "spores" before maturing as fully mobile ducklike aliens, and even as adults maintain the ability to turn back in their very resilient spore form when in mortal danger. The enormous reproductive rate coming from their fungal nature, alongside the fact modern Evronians actually clone said spores, is one of the reasons they are a Horde of Alien Locusts, as they have to find new worlds to invade and, after a certain point, turn into Planet Spaceships to divide their numbers by half and go different ways to avoid a genocidal civil war.
• Superman: The story For the Man Who Has Everything introduces the Black Mercy, a parasitic intelligent plant which attaches itself to a host and feds from their bio-aura while inducing its victim hallucinations.
• Star Wars:
  • Star Wars: Republic featured the Neti, a race of long-lived plant aliens. At least two of them, Ood Bnar and Tra'Saa, became Jedi. Neti resembled bundles of knotted tree roots but had limited shape-shifting abilities, able to alter the actual shaping of their bodies (Tra'Saa, for instance, adopted a Cute Monster Girl-like appearance, with only her "hair" appearing rootlike).
  • Star Wars: The High Republic introduced the Drengir, a sentient, telepathic species of carnivorous plant-like aliens with insatiable appetites and a healing factor powerful enough that bisecting one with a lightsaber was an effective way of causing that Drengir to asexually reproduce. Being exposed to the Drengir could cause other creatures with telepathic abilities, including Jedi, to become enmeshed in their collective mind.
• Swamp Thing:
  • The title character is a disembodied consciousness, who forms his body from the plantlife surrounding him. This works well on Earth, where the flora is just flora, and can be twisted and reshaped with impunity. When he lands on an alien planet and is surrounded by sentient plants, it's outright Body Horror the way they're twisted and crammed together to form the body of a giant space alien. For the record, said planet was the homeworld of the plantlike Silver Age Green Lantern named Medphyll (who arrives to reason with Swampy).
  • Jason Woodrue, a.k.a. the Floronic Man, a foe of Atom and Swamp Thing, occasional ally of Poison Ivy, and onetime New Guardian, is a humanoid who comes from an interdimensional planet populated by a race of dryads, and gained a tree-like form. His early pre-Crisis Atom stories have him using Earth as a base from which he would try to conquer his homeworld. His alien origin is dropped in the New 52, where Jason is now an American-born human given a tree-like form, and is known as the Seeder.
• Vampirella: One side story features a plant vampire whose only reason for existing is the Pun topping of a Tall Tale... when they drive a steak through his heart. (At which point the Galactic Police storms in and busts everybody - probably for being too silly.)
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Rykornians are small rhombus bodied male aliens with leaf-like limbs and long silky fibers growing on their faces that are born from husks on large stalks which seem to be the sedentary females of the species and which have long thin leaves they can use as tentacles and "knock out sap".

Films — Live-Action

• The Day of the Triffids: Alien plants come down to Earth in a meteor shower and start walking around and killing people with their deadly stingers.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Word of God states that ET's species is plantlike in their anatomy and asexual.
• Invasion Of The Star Creatures has a couple of carrot monsters under the control of the eponymous star creatures.
• Little Shop of Horrors featured a talking, singing, man-eating, mean green mother from outer space called Audrey II.
• Matango, a Japanese horror film, features fungi that take over human bodies. In the U.S., it had the more "colorful" title Attack of the Mushroom People. Note that these aren't technically aliens (that we know of), just an isolated parasitic species on a uncharted pacific island.
• The sarlacc in Return of the Jedi is a massive Man-Eating Plant-like creature that unnaturally prolongs the life of anything it eats while slowly digesting them for a thousand years. It's said to reproduce through spores, and because of their Bizarre Alien Biology xenobiologists are unsure whether to classify them as plant or animal but most lean towards the former.
• The Thing from Another World: The titular creature is a plant-like humanoid lifeform.

Literature

• The Angry Red Planet, a 1945 children's science fiction novel by John Cross; three kids, the hero, and a professor fly to Mars. They discover a dying planet where animal life has gone extinct and the surviving plants have developed intelligence and motility.
• Animorphs:
  • Broccoli is an alien organism, as revealed in Megamorphs #2. There's nothing remarkable about it (it is broccoli after all, it was just brought by alien immigrants millions of years ago) but as Marco jokes, it explains so much about the weird taste.
  • One of the monsters of the Hork-Bajir home world, the Lerdethak, seems to be a kind of plant. If so, Visser Three morphing into one (in book #11) is the one known example of someone acquiring a plant.
• In Auf Zwei Planeten (a 1897 novel by Kurd Laßwitz), one of the first things Josef Saltner sees on the Martian base on the North Pole is a Ro-Wa, a lily-like Martian flower that "dances" sinuously and chirps like a bird. In Laßwitz' short story Die entflohene Blume ("The Escapee Flower") there is another Martian flower called Dukchen, which is even capable of intelligent thought and to communicate with its owner, the Martial girl Ha. It is normally sedentary, but in spring the blossoms take flight to take root elsewhere.
• In Cat A Lyst, by Alan Dean Foster, the protagonists meet up with a starfaring band of treelike aliens who possess genius-level intelligence but are somewhat lacking in the common-sense department.
• The Day of the Triffids features strange plants that are in the habit of walking around and killing people with their deadly stingers. Ordinarily a rake and a good dose of weed killer would be enough to dispatch them, but at the start of the novel almost all living humans are blinded by a meteor shower. Strictly speaking, the triffids' origins were never explicitly established, with one of the protagonists believing an alternative theory that they were the terrestrial product of Soviet plant breeding experiments. The "meteor shower" may or may not have been a man-made weapon.
• One story by Edmond Hamilton is about a man who has seeds from another planet land in his backyard and grow into a green humanoid couple. The problem is, the human and the girl fall in love with each other, and the alien guy kills the girl the moment he can actually move towards her (they initially have roots). The human goes to live in a desert — he can't stand green anymore.
• "The Lotos Eaters", by Stanley Weinbaum, provides a rare sessile example in the titular aliens. In fact, their immobility is kind of the point. They're a race who wholeheartedly disbelieve in free will or life having any meaning — and if you hang around them long enough, they'll telepathically convince you of it, too, pulling you over a Despair Event Horizon so that you no longer think it's worth the bother to get up and leave their territory. When one explorer starts succumbing to this effect faster than the other, the first has to practically drag the second out of range of the creatures' telepathic influence.
• H. P. Lovecraft's works:
  • At the Mountains of Madness: The Elder Things have tissues more like those of plants than those of animals.
  • "The Whisperer in Darkness" features an alien race, the Mi-Go, sometimes called the "fungi from Yuggoth". They are not true fungi, though; that's just the nearest comparable Earth organism. In appearance they are somewhat crustacean with membranous wings, their bodies quickly dissolve after death, they are capable of human speech after surgical alteration, and the material they are made of does not appear in photographs.
• Lukan War (1969) has plant aliens from another galaxy come into conflict with the united Milky Way. They're also, for some Handwaved reason, invisible — and we're likewise invisible to them (both sides can see the others' ships, though). The various species of our galaxy are aghast at the "unnaturalness" of intelligent plant life, and began calling for a genocidal crusade, at which point the narrator, who'd earlier been scorned as overly militaristic, winds up being the most nearly pacifist person in the discussion.
• Omnivore is set on a world where fungal life forms take the place of animal life. One species of mobile fungus, nicknamed "mantas" for their shape, combines this trope with Starfish Alien.
• Pkhentz by Andrei Sinyavsky: The protagonist is a plant-like alien who was stranded from his home planet when his ship crashed and disguises himself as a human so he can live among people unnoticed. He isn't very happy.
• Rod Allbright Alien Adventures series includes a sentient plant named Phil among its crew. (Phillogenous esk Piemondum, in full.) He looks just like a giant flower in a floating pot and speaks by 'burping' air through his pods. When the main character expresses astonishment that a plant could talk, he responds, "You're made of meat. It's a wonder you can think at all." Which is also a Shout-Out to this story.
• Sector General: The AACP. It's even mentioned that the creator of the classification scheme failed to take the possibility of intelligent plants, and is in fact used in every book as the prime example of how the system is imperfect.
• In Semiosis by Sue Burke, the planet Pax is dominated by many varieties of sentient plant. The smartest of these is a vast, distributed bamboo-like plant which enters into a symbiotic relationship with a colony of humans, who it initially views as mere "animal-tools" but gradually grows to respect as something like equals.
• Speaker for the Dead, and the other related sequels to Ender's Game, have the pequeninos, which after dying become sentient trees.
  • In fact, every native species (only a few dozen species exist) on that planet had an animal/plant duality to its life cycle. It's an important plot point when the humans figure out WHY and actually explains the single-biome nature of the planet (it's all just fields and forests).
  • The cause of all this is the Descolada, a highly-adaptable virus capable of infecting any living thing. It unravels any DNA strand it comes into contact with, causing the death of any organism that has not adapted to it. Humans can only survive it by ingesting genetically-engineered food supplements daily, and all who contract it are carriers. When the Descolada first appeared on Lusitania, it wiped out the vast majority of plant and animal species, leaving behind those that managed to adapt and use the Descolada as part of their lifecycle. Essentially, this means that various animals are, at different stages in their lives, plants and vice versa. The "piggies", local primitive sentients, turn into trees when properly killed (it's a great honor) and retain some of their consciousness as plants, whose sap is used to fertilize female "piggies" (which look like tiny snakes). When the Starways Congress finds out about the Descolada, they send a fleet to destroy Lusitania. Luckily, thanks to the lack of FTL travel, the fleet won't arrive for decades.
• Star Trek Expanded Universe:
  • Star Trek Novel 'Verse: The Mabrae, appearing in Star Trek: The Lost Era and Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch, are animals but live symbiotically with plants that grow on their bodies, and are tailored to each individual. Security guards have tough bark as natural body armour, diplomats and politicians grow exotic colourful flowers. These plants are essentially the Mabrae's clothes. They consider segregation between leaf and flesh barbaric.
  • Doctor's Orders: The Lahit are basically walking fir trees. Upon seeing a group of them, McCoy snarks that Birnham Wood finally gets to come to Dunsinane.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • "Day of the Sepulchral Night": The Zelosians are basically Ridiculously Human Plant Aliens. They bleed green, have very vivid green eyes, and can live for a month on water and sunlight, but otherwise are basically human, down to digestive tracts and reproduction. They're even classified as "Near-Human", implying that they're capable of interbreeding with humans. Somehow. Lampshaded by one of them in Death Star, when he wonders if any geneticists have been able to make sense of his kind.
  • There are several others, among whom the Neti (Force-sensitive sentient shapeshifting trees, alternating between a sapling stage, fully mobile periods of a few centuries (in which the females have breasts for some reason), and a up to millennium of hibernation in the form a big, rooted tree, which can extend to indefinite given the right conditions) and the Baffor Trees (regular, non-sentient trees on their own, but able to link their roots together to create a collective consciousness)
  • A one-off joke in Darksaber mentions a carnivorous alien vending a vegetable stand next to a plant-like alien selling hunks of meat.
• In "To Church With Mr. Multhiford", by Robert Reed, the titular farmer theorizes that corn is an alien invader of sorts, but beneficial. His farm has frequent Crop Circles and has one of the highest yields in the area. He claims that man didn't domesticate corn, but that corn domesticated man; we plow the ground, water it, and propagate its children, and it rewards us with food and wealth. Empires that didn't care for its crops — the Soviet Union, Ancient Greece and Rome — all failed as farmers because they couldn't keep the crops happy.
• Seanan McGuire's short story Too Late Now is a tribute to The Day of the Triffids (and mentions it by name), featuring a post-apocalyptic Scavenged Punk world where humans live in small fortresses in fear of ravenous plants.
• Uplift: The Kanten were genetically engineered to be sapient over a period of roughly a hundred thousand years. They are small trees but can walk and talk, and are no "closer to nature" than animal-like aliens. They are one of the few species allied to Earthclan. Mulc-"spiders" are a species of sapient, but sessile, plant-like things quite unlike any life on Earth, which exist to dissolve cities after planets are declared fallow and evacuated.
• The Venom of Argus by Edmund Cooper (writing as Richard Avery) features an alien tree with long tentacles that grab victims and take them to its mouth to be dissolved.
• Well World: The Czillians are bipedal sentient plants. They are a lot more plant-like and a lot less humanoid then many of the other examples.
• Young Wizards: The Demisiv look like walking Christmas trees with berry-like eyes.
• Zones of Thought: The skrode-riders in A Fire Upon the Deep and The Children of the Sky are part-plant A.I.s that live just about everywhere in the inhabited galaxy and turn out to be quite important to the plot.

Live-Action TV

• The Avengers (1960s) episode "The Man-Eater of Surrey Green" features a giant plant that's using psychic powers to control a team of scientists to help it spread its seeds across the world. It then eats them all, as is its wont. The episode also features a baffling off-hand reference to forests on the moon.
• The Brittas Empire: Used for a brief gag at the end of "Body Language" when it is revealed that a houseplant that Helen had purchased at a market was actually an alien life-form, who proceeds to warp out in front of Colin after concluding that there's No Intelligent Life Here.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Mission to the Unknown" and "The Daleks' Master Plan" have the Varga plants on the Planet Kembel — homicidal mobile plants which infect people, first making them turn into homicidal maniacs, and then into Varga plants. They are native to Skaro, which suggests that they might be another of Davros' projects.
  • "The Seeds of Doom" has an alien plant that also transforms people into plants — shades of Body Horror there.
  • Meglos, the evil shape-shifting cactus who wants to take over the universe.
  • "The End of the World" features bipedal, talking plants that evolved from trees in the Brazilian rainforest. However, in appearance they're more like Rubber-Forehead Aliens — or, in Jabe's case, a Green-Skinned Space Babe. They have concealed tentacles ("I'm not supposed to show them in public"), and consider being breathed on a rather "intimate" gift. "There's more where that came from."
• Farscape: Zhaan is a Human Alien plant. It's for the most part treated as no different from the various other biological quirks of the aliens in the series (we aren't even told until late in the first season). It becomes a plot point in one episode when she starts "budding" and growing more aggressive because her body needs to feed on some animal protein once in a while. She also really enjoys being out in bright solar light.
• Garth Marenghis Darkplace parodied this beautifully when we find out that broccoli is alien. This is the reason why people in that episode were suddenly turning into broccoli. But the space broccoli was a metaphor for AIDS!
• Lexx: Lykka is a carnivorous plant which takes her form from the thoughts of those nearby, which she sprouts as a form of camouflage.
• Lost in Space features a somewhat-infamous episode entitled "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" with an alien carrot, Tybo the Giant Carrot Man, as a villain; some of the cast couldn't stop laughing on-camera at how ridiculous it was.
• The Outer Limits (1963): "Moonstone" features the Grippians, an alien race who are basically sentient anenomes.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Flower Child", a plant-based alien, the Last Of Its Kind, travelled to Earth via a meteor. It became embedded in the soil of a community garden of a San Francisco apartment building and grew into a strange plant overnight. After it kills Mary Cummings with its stinger, the alien uses the energy that it absorbed in the process to transform itself into a beautiful young woman named Violet. Taking up residence in Mary's apartment, Violet seeks to procreate and produces a scent which men find seductive. She sets her sights on Chris, who has just moved into the building with his fiancée Mia and is experiencing pre-wedding jitters. Chris initially manages to resist temptation due to his commitment to remain faithful to Mia but the landlord Mr. Sylvano is less strong-willed and is killed by Violet for his trouble. Chris eventually succumbs to her charms and they have sex. As a result, Violet obtains Chris' seed and uses it to produce millions of offspring which she ejects from her body through the mouth. Her species will soon spread all over Earth and replace humanity as the dominant species.
• In Quark, Ficus is a Human Alien in appearance, but because he is actually a Plant Alien, his psychology is that of an emotionless Spock, only more so. His Mirror Universe double is exactly like him because "There are no good or bad plants, only plants."
• Ultraseven: The Wyann, the Aliens of the Week in "The Green Terror", are sapient, mobile masses of thorny shrubbery that turn humans into more of their kind by drinking their blood.
• The X-Files: "Field Trip" is about a sprawling underground fungi that hypnotizes people into thinking they're in a nice safe place, like a bed in cabin, to immobilize and devour them. It almost gets Mulder and Scully. This plot is based on a news report about a fungus in Oregon that is two miles across and may be the largest living thing on Earth.

Music

• Leslie Fish: One verse of the Star Trek Filk Song "Banned from Argo" is:
  Our Helmsman ^note Mr. Sulu loves exotic plants; the plants all love him too
  He took some down on leave with him and we wondered what they'd do,
  'Til the planetary governor called and swore upon his life
  That a gang of plants entwined his house and then seduced his wife!\\

Radio

• Journey into Space: Discussed in The Red Planet. Lemmy suspects that the Martians may be vegetable men.

Tabletop Games

• 2300 AD: In the adventure Energy Curve, the Klaxun are mobile plants with human-level intelligence.
• CthulhuTech: The Migou appear, as in the Cthulhu Mythos, as flying masses of aren fungus vaguely resembling giant insects.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Aartuk are nomadic starfish-like sapient plants that are always battle-hungry.
  • Hamadryads are sapient plants from the Feywild that can alter their bodies during sleep to gain different abilities and the appearance of their foliage changes as they age from spring to summer to autumn to winter. They existed in the 3rd edition, where they were called "Killoren" and were explicitly a plant-based member of The Fair Folk.
• Myriad Song has Morphir, which become sapient, motile shapeshifters when fed the brains of sapient creatures. Ldum-Rabo are a fungus-based sapience (Ldum), paired with a non-sapient humanoid host (Rabo).
• In Rocket Age the entire moon of Ganymede is covered in plant life, in both earth-like forms and animal analogues.
• SPI's Universe science fiction RPG. In the list of encounters in the adventure guide, alien #28 is a balloon-like Living Gasbag with 6 two-foot long tentacles hanging from it. It maintains buoyancy by producing lighter-than-air gasses inside its body out of air and sunlight, and propels itself by squirting gasses out its underside.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Orks have had a weird history with this trope. About the only thing that has remained constant is that they reproduce asexually, giving off spores through their life which grow new Orks in underground wombs; they release extra spores upon death, and as a result are basically impossible to completely wipe out. It's also implied they can photosynthesize. As for what else is canon, well, the writers haven't been able to find something that makes sense. They've gone from a symbiotic relationship between a mammal-like creature and a fungus, meaning they have green skin but red blood, to fungus/algae/vertebrate hybrids (after somebody pointed out the difference between plants and fungi).
  • There are a few more conventional examples, such as the Brainleaf and Spiker, alien trees that reproduce by converting anything that crosses their path into another of their kind.

Theme Parks

• E.T. Adventure takes the plant-like aspects of E.T.'s race even further, depicting some of the Green Planet's species as outright resembling plants, for example, Orbidon takes on a mushroom-like appearance while Magdol resembles a bouquet of flowers.

Toys

• Tamagotchi: Certain breeds of Tamagotchi resemble Earth plants, with Kuratchi (a flower Tamagotchi in a flower pot) being one of the earliest-appearing examples.

Video Games

• Albion brings us Argim. Technically he's an iskai (a standard alien species in the game), until one of his experiments with immortality caused the psychic organ connected to his brain to somehow fuse with the plants that make up his home, effectively turning him into a living dungeon.
• In Aleste and Aleste 2, the heroine battles a horde of super-intelligent plants trying to take over the world.
• Chlorophyll features the Xyllans, leafy bark-covered humanoids who slip into torpor in locations without sunlight unless they're wearing a solar vest.
• Endless Space 2: The Unfallen are essentially moving, sentient trees. They were content with just slow and peaceful advancement ever since they became sentient right until two other races had a skirmish above their planet; this woke them up, and made them think they should go out into the galaxy and try to calm things down, hopefully in a peaceful manner.
• EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance has two in the Ghost Gate dimension: what can only be described as a carnivorous square of dead grass, and a large flower with tooth-lined petals and a human face in the middle.
• Mass Effect: The Thorian is one huge plant-like... thing that can control sapient creatures through spores.
• Master of Orion 3 has the Audrieh and Phaigour as minor non-playable races. Their exact natures are never really clarified beyond being categorized as "Plant" and "Fungal" respectively.
• Meteos: Two of the many diverse aliens can be classified here: the sapient clairvoyant flowers of the planet Florias and the symbiotic living trees of Wuud/Arborea.
• Metroid II: Return of Samus: Blob throwers look like flowers on top of tree trunks anyway, although it can move almost like rubber to throw its blobs. Moheeks are said to be but do not look the part. Skorp sprites make them look like flowery cacti but official art makes them look more like arthropods. Official art makes septoggs look like dirt monsters with grass growing on them.
• Otherspace: The peaceful merchants called Muscipulans are man-sized Venus fly traps with dozens of wriggling tentacles for locomotion.
• Pikmin: The titular pikmin are part Plant Aliens, part social insects, all cute. The "alien" part is relative, though: to Olimar and the other Hocotatian astronauts they certainly are peculiar alien creatures, but the setting of the game is all but stated to be Earth After the End. There's also the walking, delicious fungus Puffstool with mutagenic spores.
• Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare introduces the Alien Flower in the Legends of the Lawn DLC. She looks like violet Fantastic Flora mixed with The Greys. Her special ability is shooting alien spores that remain in the air while damaging enemies.
• Sanitarium: The second area ("The innocent abandoned") in under control of Mother, a massive plant-being and a Well-Intentioned Extremist who is disgusted by the idea of meat beings, but considers children to be precious innocents and wants to save them... by turning them into plants and integrating them in herself. She's also an allegory for the disease.
• Science Girls!: The antagonists, complete with "They're not plants, that's not how plants work!" lecture from Biology Girl.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: The Xenofungus is the base for the Planet-wide Hive Mind.
• The Space Bar gives us the Vedj, mobile plants with normal human-level intelligence. This gets creepy when as a puzzle solution you have to eat the fruits of one of the aliens as an antidote. As in, her children. Squick.
• Spore has several plant parts that can be used for creating creatures.
• Starbound:
  • The playable Florans subvert the nature-loving plant people stereotype by being violent, bloodthirsty, caveman-like carnivores and are thought little of by the other, fleshy races.
  • The nonplayable Agarians are mushroom people who speak a language that is unaffected by the player's Translation Convention, making their origins and motives very mysterious. Occasionally, you'll find a settlement of them having Florans imprisoned in underground dungeons, hinting at some sort of relationship between them.
  • The Poptop, a commonly-encountered beast, is actually a plant, according to source material. And like the Florans, their innocent appearance hides a thoroughly vicious predator.
• Star Control II:
  • The Supox. When the protagonist protests that human scientists (and science-fiction authors) have proven that intelligent plant life is a scientific impossibility, the Supox spokesman replies, "Yes. This has been confirmed by our people as well. Strange, is it not? Many of our people regard this inconsistency as proof of our divine origin." Luckily, they aren't jerks about it.
  • The Mycon are a race of fungoid aliens created by the Precursors as biological terraforming devices. However, over the millennia they have gone rogue, developed a religion centered around the worship of "Juffo-Wup" and basically do the opposite of their original mission (they transform verdant worlds into ones they have been adapted to live in, i.e. barren hellscapes). ^note This info isn't explicitly stated within SC2, but has been stated by the original creators, Fred and Paul, in an IRC chat.
  • The third game adds the Lk, a mushroom-like race that evolved from fungi in a Precursor technology cache. They are jerks about it, seeing themselves as the heirs to the Precursors.
• Starcraft: It's been mentioned that the Protoss photosynthesize.
• Stellaris has fungoids by default (though some of them appear to be parasitical or symbiotic on a meaty host creature) and plantoids as a DLC.
• Super Mario Bros. has the Whittles from Super Mario Galaxy 2, creatures resembling living, simplistic wooden statues
• UFO Afterlight: The Martians are actually plant-like humanoid aliens.
• Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams: The Martian wildlife is often composed of moving plants (die, roaming cacti, die!). This includes the sapient inhabitants.
• Voyage: Inspired By Jules Verne: Five different species of aggressive lunar plants pose obstacles to your explorations. Their fruit is crucial to completion of the game.
• In Waking Mars, the Zoa, while not technically plants, are fairly similar to plants, considering they are stationary.
• Warcraft includes several moving plantlike creatures. Notable ones are bogbeasts (shambling swamp thing-type creatures), lashers (flower-like plants with small roots for lef and tentacle-like vines), fungal giants (giant creatures made ouf of fungi), and the Sporelings, a group of fungus-based humanoids in World of Warcraft that are friendly to players and sell some unique items and recipes (including a pet sporebat) for those who build reputation with them.
• War Wind: The Eaggra are a numerous plant species that was used for slave labour by the reptilian Tha Roon before the inevitable uprising.

Web Comics

• In Captain Ufo, the Neseans are plant aliens evolved from the Man Eating Plants the crew met at the beginning of the season. Actually, the plants evolved to humanoid forms exactly because Ufo invaded their planet
• Irregular Webcomic!: Quercus is a tree being from the planet Fagalia. He really dislikes florists.
  "How would you like it if someone cut off your reproductive organs and arranged them in a vase for people to admire and smell?"

Web Original

• Orion's Arm has several examples of "provolved" plants.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum: The Flowers that lead the PPC are this, with the twist that they were originally plants from Earth that ended up on another planet due to a literal Plot Hole.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-1923 is a forest on an asteroid.
• Snaiad has both animal- and plant-like alien lifeforms. Thing is, unlike in our world the distinction between "plants" and "animals" isn't as clear because some "plant" and "animal" groups (most notably the vertebrate analogues) evolved from things with animal and plant characteristics. Word of God states that the "vertebrates" still have a lethal relic of this: vegetative cancer.

Web Videos

• Mahu: In "Second Chance", the galaxy houses several intergalactic nations made entirely of sentient plant aliens. Also, for some odd reason, most of these nations happen to be theocratic.

Western Animation

• Ben 10:
  • Wildvine is an alien resembling a humanoid Venus flytrap. Cleverly, his species is called "Florauna" (Flora/Fauna).
  • Ben 10: Alien Force: Swampfire is a plant guy that attacks with fire, of all things. Ultimate Swampfire from Ben 10: Alien Force and Ben 10: Ultimate Alien looks like a tree and wields explosive savia.
  • The Highbreed are also plant-like. One episode shows they drink with "roots" they have in their stomachs.
• Beast Machines: Botanica is a robot plant alien — who took her form from an entire planet of plant aliens — and the style of the series plus her personal philosophy makes it hard to keep track of which mode is which.
• Count Duckula once travels to a strange future where Earth is populated by intelligent, human-sized vegetables. Problem: He's a vegetarian vampire. (OTOH, humans have no problem with eating meat while consisting of meat, but that point wasn't made in the episode.)
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: Courage seems to run into a lot of hostile, talking fruits and vegetables. Not all of them are space aliens, but some are.
• Darkwing Duck: The villains of "Twin Beaks" grow as plants, but their eventual form is a copy of someone in duck society. Their infiltration is halted partly through the aid of other aliens, talking cows.
• The Dreamstone: While not "aliens" per se, the Wuts are revealed to be plantlike in more than just their green and vaguely leafy-looking appearance. In one episode, we see a yellowish and aged-looking Wut step into a pool of water... and in the time it takes to pan to the water and back to his face, he becomes recognizable again as one of the main characters.
• Numbuh Vine in Codename: Kids Next Door (well, more specifically the Galactic KND April Fool's joke video/stealth trailer) is an alien operative who looks like a potted plant turned upside down, and whose full numbuh is the chemical formula for chlorophyll. She's also the true identity of Numbuh One's girlfriend, Lizzie Devine.
• Lilo & Stitch franchise: Sprout (X-509) is a Venus flytrap-like creature who was created by Jumba to grow into an uncontrollable destructive forest.
  • In his debut in Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Lilo tries to use him in a bet against Mertle to win an orchid competition at a fair she was completely unprepared for. Mertle gets scared by Sprout snapping at her and accidentally breaks the pot he was planted in, causing him to root to the ground and grow into a giant plant with his buds terrorizing the fair.
  • In the Stitch! anime (listed here instead of the Anime & Manga folder for consistency with the franchise), it's revealed that he can also spread seeds across the galaxy to grow copies of himself known as Sproutlings (X-509-A), which carry his original programming.
• Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors: The Monster Minds, using giant vines to travel between worlds. Unique in the listed examples as being plant-cyborgs.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • One episode features an invasion by broccoli-shaped aliens. With their parents paralyzed, the children of Townsville resorted to eating the intruders, at the PPGs' behest. (Obviously, the Aesop to be learned here was to eat your vegetables... but hypnosis by eating vegetables was what brought up this situation in the first place.)
  • Relish Rampage, a tie-in game, has the Girls defeating alien pickles.
• Space Ghost:
  • "The Gargoyloids". The title monsters control ambulatory plant life, which they use to entwine and capture Space Ghost, Jan, Jace and Blip.
  • "Two Faces of Doom". Spider Woman uses seeds to create "giant spider plants", intending for them to kill Space Ghost and his sidekicks.
• Star Trek: The Animated Series features the plant-like Phylosians.
• Sushi Pack, "From the Planet Citrus" sees the pack getting jailed for trying to offer flowers, chocolate (made from cocoa seeds), and a painting of applesauce to some orange (shape, not just color) aliens from the planet Citrus. Moral of the day: Always do your research!

Other

• From the realm of urban legends about cryptids and possible close encounters of the first kind, we have the story of the Stumps, ostensibly alien creatures which were allegedly run across by two teenage girls in Oregon in 1966. YMMV on whether or not to take the sighting seriously.

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