Yup, that is an entire town on the top.
In Real Life, flowers rarely are bigger than a foot or so tall, and anything bigger is considered gigantic. However, in fiction, blossoms can be much larger and taller than that. Many reasons can explain the use of those behemothic flowers:
- They can convey an alien and otherworldly flair to an atmosphere, just like its Fungus Humongous sister trope.
- These giant flowers can be quite effective at adding to a magical, even fairytale background, especially with the strong association of flowers with love, beauty and magic.
- The giant blossoms can also fit in a dense jungle-like biome, their tallness reflecting the triumph of plant life.
- At last, they can be there simply to bring in the Scenery Porn.
Note that normal-sized flowers that appear big because the protagonist are very puny aren't covered by this trope. Compare Fungus Humongous for its fungal equivalent, albeit which is less prone to be used to add a whimsical atmosphere. See also Fantastic Flora, which groups all the tropes about unusual plant life.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: In "The Flower Plot", Whispy Woods has the fortune of having a flower grow right in front of him, which he names Lovely. However, King Dedede transforms Lovely into a monster. Like in the video games, Lovely deceives others with her adorable face. Unlike the games, she goes One-Winged Angel and tries to suck the life out of Whispy.
- Naruto: The Demonic Statue of Outer Path, when not in use, sits on a gigantic lotus flower.
- The Ten Tails, of which The Demonic Statue of Outer Path is an empty shell, in it's raw, natural form, is a giant flower in its own right.
- In One Piece, before and during the Time Skip, Usopp is trapped in a strange forest island with only a man named Heracles keeping him company. Then the "island" suddenly folds itself — and the island is revealed to actually be a giant carnivorous flower. With the help of Heracles, Usopp managed to survive there for 2 years.
- Primitive Boy Ryu: The man-eating plant is large in size and targets unsuspecting humans for it's prey.
- Smile Pretty Cure!: In the third-to-last episode, Joker sends Cure Peace and her Bad End counterpart into a Pocket Dimension full of giant flowers to fight. While flowers of all shapes and colors are present, the two spend most of the battle on a single red flower that's larger than all the others.
Asian Animation
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Among the Bizarre World's flora are flowers, a lot of them small, but some as large as trees.
Comic Strips
Fan Works
- The Seal of Wax and Glass
: In the center of the island in the middle of the Sea of Ghosts, there's a garden of flowers so large that, in the thick fog, an onlooker would at first mistake them for common trees.
Films — Animation
- My Little Pony: The Movie (1986): On the way to Flutter Valley, the kids and ponies cross a field of sunflowers as tall as trees.
Films — Live-Action
- Star Wars: The jungle planet Felucia is completely covered in thick, thriving forests of enormous plants and fungi: besides giant purple mushrooms the size of trees, the Felucian jungles are also home to numerous trumpet-shaped blue flowers the size of houses.
Literature
- The Neverending Story: Horok, Xayide the witch's hand-shaped castle, is surrounded by a forest of orchids taller than a man — orchids that also happen to be carnivorous, thus serving as a first layer of protection around her lair.
- Pettson and Findus: There are giant flowers, mostly dandelions, in the background of most scenes. They are completely ignored by the characters or the narrator, and are just there as an artistic choice by the illustrator.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek: Picard: The synths of Coppelius defend their planet with Organic Technology that they've named "Orchids." These flowers are the size of a starship, can propel themselves through space, and can disable a ship's power systems on contact.
Picard: ...What just happened?
Jurati: They hit us with a flower.
Music
- The Beatles: "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" has two passages of towering flowers, such as "cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head..." and "everyone smiles as your drift past the flowers that grow so incredibly high..."
- Tears for Fears: At the end of the "Sowing the Seeds of Love" music video, the Earth orbits around a sun-sized sunflower.
- The blue tulip from the song "Sailors" by Alexander Vertinsky. The lyrics, originally in Russian, refer to it as "an enormous and mean giant".
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- In module EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, which is based on Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the Player Characters encounter a flowerbed filled with ten-foot-tall versions of normal flowers. The flowers are magical, not just because of their size, but because they can talk, have petals made of precious metals and huge jewels for eyes.
- Chronolilies are 50-foot-wide pitcher plants, filled with nectar that constantly displays soundless images of other places (or even other times, depending on the variety), like a giant, organic scrying bowl. Some sages master an esoteric method of plucking leaves from a chronolily's base to conjure up specific visions, others put their hand in the plant's nectar and concentrate to try and see something.
- Gamma World: In module GW6 Alpha Factor, in the area around Mindkeep, there are multiple areas with flowers up to 20 meters high, including the Rainbow Forest (petunias), Ice Forest (daisies), Fire Forest (snapdragons) and Rose Fields. The giant plants are mutations caused by the nightmarish effects that reduced the planet to an After the End setting.
- Pathfinder: One of the few stable features of the Positive Energy Plane, the fiery realm where souls germinate before moving on to animate living beings in the rest of the universe, is a grove of crystalline flowers tall as the tallest trees in the material world, each lit from within by an eternally burning light — except for a few that are dark and dead, and fewer still that are shattered and guttering. These flowers are lovingly tended and almost worshipped by the jyoti, Bird People-like entities who tend and guard the plane's fields of immature souls, and each massive flower is known to represent a mortal soul who rose to godhood — the dead flowers are those whose gods died, the defiled ones are of gods who embraced undeath.
Video Games
- Apsulov: End of Gods: Apart from giant mushrooms and giants, period, Jotunheim also has giant ferns that would utterly dwarf even Midgard trees.
- Arise: A Simple Story: One of the sections of the afterlife you explore has enormous sunflowers many times taller than the old man. He needs to jump through a path made up by their petals in order to advance.
- In Banjo-Kazooie, in Click Clock Wood, Kazooie must lay eggs into a hole in Spring to plant a seed. As the plant grows, Banjo and Kazooie must water it in Summer and Autumn by Beak-Busting Gobi so he will spit his water out at the plant. When the plant is fully watered, it is revealed to be a massive flower that blooms to reveal a Jiggy inside. To the get to the top of the flower, Banjo and Kazooie must jump off the Zubbas' Hive a third of the way up the massive tree the level takes place in.
- Bayonetta 2: The floral demon Alraune can summon giant demonic flowers that can spit sticky goo on Bayonetta, immobilizing her for a short time.
- The NES adaptation of Devil Hunter Yohko have a stage set on a giant flower which the titular character can run and jump upon.
- The Fairy Bloom has multiple flowers that are larger than the fairy character, who is implied to be human-sized:
- Fairy Bloom: It's an Endless Game of a Protection Mission that's about defending a growing flower that's more than thrice as tall as her.
- Fairy Bloom Freesia: An official screenshot of Day 9◊, shows Freesia with sunflowers that are taller than her in the background.
- Kirby: Triple Deluxe: The giant plant Dreamstalk is topped with an equally giant flower. During the climax, the Big Bad Queen Sectonia merges with said flower as her One-Winged Angel form.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Skull Lake is filled with giant purple flowers growing just beneath the surface of the water. They vary in size, but even the smallest ones have petals comfortably as long as Link is tall.
- Miitopia:
- The wooded Realm of the Fay is some sort of Macro Zone covered with ridiculously tall plants, and the Lotus Lake located in the middle of it features gigantic glowing pink lotus flower to bring in the Scenery Porn.
- There are also the Mars Mii Trap and its brethren, which are Mii-sized carnivorous flowers that try to gobble up Miis, putting them out of commission for several turns before they are freed.
- Minecraft mods:
- The mod Biomes O' Plenty introduces the Garden or Flower Island biome which spawns with giant versions of the dandelion and poppy flowers replacing trees, in addition to large quantities of more conventional flowers.
- The Flowercraft mod is entirely themed around this concept. Its main addition to the game is the Phantasia biome, distinguished by titanic versions of the regular flowers — both ones from the base game such as dandelions, tulips and daises and new ones original the mod such as thistles, foxgloves and gentians — towering over fields of regular blooms. These flowers, in fact, are actually substantially taller than most trees in the game. The giant blooms can either spawn naturally as part of the new biome or be created from regular flowers by using a special kind of bone meal. A few flowers are fairly unusual compared to typical giant flowers, most notably the orchids, which are bent double and whose blooms almost touch the ground, and "blowballs", which are giant versions of dandelion seedheads.
- Ōkami: The Spider Queen masquerades as a giant and creepy flower with eyes in place of the stamens to lure unsuspecting prey. After defeat, she transforms into a giant lotus flower several times bigger than Amaterasu.
- Parkitect: Giant flowers are available as one of the "Fantasy" decorations.
- Phoenotopia and remake Phoenotopia: Awakening both feature Sunflower Road named after the giant sunflowers that grow there to several stories high. Their leaves also serve as platforms to jump onto to avoid the Bull Bees flitting between the flowers and to reach some collectables.
- Pikmin Bloom: Some landmarks are represented by giant daisy-like flowers many times the player figure's height.
- Pokémon: Venusaur sports a massive one on its back. Its Gigantamax form takes this even further, with the flower growing to a gargantuan size and enveloping its body when it Gigantamaxes.
- Starbound: Giant flower biomes have been a feature since the earliest versions, but not always in the same locations. Earlier versions had giant flowers in the "toxic swamp" mini-biome that could appear even on low difficulty planets, while the current version has the giant flower mini-biome that can appear on jungle planets.
- Sunless Skies: Gigantic flowers are a fairly common feature in the Reach, an untamed area of space characterized by its fertility and abundance of lush plant and fungal growth.
- Perhaps the biggest flower of them all is the one on which Titania is built. Yes, it is big enough for an entire town to be built on top of it. From above it is approximately two dozen of times the size of the player's ship.
- There is also the verdant Leadbeater and Stainrod's Nature Reserve, which is built in a lush and verdant if threatening area of the Reach, which features among other giant tubular flowers larger than the locomotives players roam around in.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- In Luigi's Mansion, Luigi can water a seedling growing in the Boneyard once during each chapter. Water it enough and it grows into a huge red flower that is bigger than Luigi himself. It then matures into a big fruit, which contains a diamond.
- Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle: The Sunflower is one big sunflower. It seems at least four times as big as the rest of the main cast.
- Super Mario Sunshine: The regular sunflowers are already rather big, but the Great Sunflower takes it much further, being several times as big as Mario.
- Yoshi's Island: When Yoshi hits certain ? Clouds, the clouds will reveal a sunflower seed. When the seed hits the ground, it will grow into a giant sunflower, and Yoshi must climb to the top of it by jumping on its leaves.
- Yoshi's Crafted World: The Origami Gardens are filled with various flowers several time bigger that Yoshi and the local fauna alike.
- The Wolf and the Waves: Two of the ingredients to the cure (the titan stalk and the giant bloom) are the size of a human.
Webcomics
- Daughter of the Lilies: In Chapter 10, a Wild Magic storm strikes an area that the characters are traveling through. When they emerge after the storm abates, they see that the magic caused the environment to grow gigantic, including wildflowers that are now taller than trees.
- Homestuck: Winning Sburb causes Skaia to germinate a new universe, during which time its surface blooms with flowering lily pads large enough to see from outer space.
Western Animation
- Bo on the Go!: "Bo and the Stinky Snork" involves the protagonists coming across a garden of giant flowers, and friendly ones for that matter.
- The Dog & Pony Show: One episode has Dog and Pony trying to grow a garden with Misty. When the plants don't grow as quickly as they would have liked, Pony uses his magic bottom to make them grow faster. They shoot up about 12 feet. Of course, the same goes for the weeds.
- Dragon Tales: Among the many unusual plants found in Dragon Land are dande-lions, otherwise normal dandelions the height of a person — and which also roar like real lions.
- Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: In "Burrow Girl", Kipo's first exposure to the weirdness of the surface is a store overgrown by immense flowers with blooms larger than herself.
- The Legend of Tarzan: A giant field of yellow flowers is discovered on the island, with Jane and her father extracting some fluid from a stalk to study it. Unfortunately, this fluid ends up spilling on some rhinoceros beetles, and it makes them grow into rampaging monsters.
- The Lone Ranger (1966): In "Forest of Death", a Mad Scientist has created a large variety of dangerous, mutant plants. One of these is a carnivorous bloom large enough to eat a grown man.
- My Little Pony:
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- "Three's a Crowd": Discord claims to have contracted an illness called the Blue Flu, which can only be cured by brewing a tisane out of the petals of a type of daisy growing at the very edges of Equestria. When Twilight and Cadance arrive at the daisy's location, they discover a little detail Discord left out: the flower is a good couple of stories tall, with a stem the girth of a good-sized tree trunk and petals big enough to completely cover a pony they fall on top of.
- "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?": At the end, after having overcome an entity that twisted her dreams into nightmares, Luna dreams of enjoying a peaceful, untroubled night's sleep beneath a tree bearing giant, softly glowing blossoms wider than the bed she sleeps on, in the middle of a surreal nighttime dreamscape full of other phosphorescent plants and mushrooms, all of enormous size.
- My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale: In "Neighfever", once Dahlia learns to use her magic, she uses it to grow flowers larger than trees throughout the town. However, this comes with commensurate amounts of pollen, leading to a hay fever epidemic.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Planet Sheen: In the first episode, Sheen is asked to fight a fearsome beast. He is shown a picture of it and sees that it's dwarfed by a flower and agrees to fight it. Later on, he starts to reconsider when he finds the flower and it's as tall as a redwood.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
- "The Deserter": Towering Bith are flowers found on Saleucami that look like Joshua trees mixed with palms when flowering, and otherwise simply resemble tall, leafless tree topped with white bulbs.
- "Holocron Heist": The part of Felucia where Obi-Wan and Anakin are rescued by Plo Koon's gunships is covered with teal flowers with maroon stamens and veins well over twenty feet tall.
- Steven Universe: In "Jungle Moon", the titular moon where Stevonnie is trapped is home to trees that more closely resemble giant flowers than Earth trees.
- R.O.B. the Robot: The Supersize planet from "Tall Tale" is full of these, as well as mushrooms of the same proportions.
- Rocko's Modern Life: In "Keeping Up with the Bigheads," Rocko plants some seeds to make his yard look better (in order to avoid his house being condemned by Ed Bighead's nephew.) After Heffer fertilizes the lawn, only one little flower comes up...but then the ground begins to shake, and several daisies the size of trees pop up, as well as random patches of grass.
Real Life
- The plant with the largest individual flower is the famous Rafflesia, native to the rainforests of Southeast Asia. At about 3 feet across, it's still pretty small compared to many fictional examples of this trope. Nevertheless, Rafflesia is a common sight in fiction, especially in anime and manga.
- Considerably bigger, but technically composed of many small flowers, is the Titan Arum, from the same part of the world. Its flower grows up to 10 feet tall. Also like Rafflesia, it smells like rotting flesh to attract the carrion-eating insects that pollinate it.
- The ultimate real life example, though, is the Talipot palm of India. Its actual flowers are small, however—like the Titan Arum, it has what's known as an inflorescence, which is a cluster of multiple flowers that looks and functions like one giant flower. In the Talipot palm's case, this inflorescence can grow up to 26 feet across, putting it on par with many of the fictional examples mentioned above!
