Fantastic plants you'll never grow

April 19, 8:05 AMNY Gardening ExaminerMarc Montefusco

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Don't you hate it when this happens?

If you're looking for a list of great plants – you know, Ten Plants for Shade Success, Pros Pick the Best New Perennials, A Dozen Never-Fail Roses – you've come to the wrong place. The plants described here truly are fantastic, but you're not likely to see them in your garden.

First is Audrey Jr., or Audrey II, depending which version of Little Shop of Horrors you're watching. Both the 1960 Roger Corman classic and the 1986 remake feature the alien, sentient, carnivorous plant, which florist's assistant Seymour Krelborn uses to advance his romance with the plant's namesake, Audrey Fulquard. Both versions have their high points (Jack Nicholson as the 1960 evil dentist, for example) but it's hard not to love the late Levi Stubb's voice gurgling "Feed me!"

Several classic sci-fi flicks featured equally evil, if less personable, plants. The Day of the Triffids, incarnated as a 1951 novel, a 1962 film, a 1981 BBC television series, and apparently is in production for a big screen remake, involves the escape of deadly, mobile plants previously farmed for their valuable oil. They prey on a human population largely blinded by a meteor storm, and post-apocalyptic wackiness ensues. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which gave us the term "pod people," explores the sociological and political implications of being taken over by "seeds from space," which cleverly reproduce their human hosts. Where Body Snatchers is considered to be a genuine work of art, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is considered to be a goofball farce, as any film featuring giant tomatoes rolling across the landscape and crushing their victims must be. The 1978 spoof ends with the mutant tomatoes reduced to their former vegetative state by the song Puberty Love. Go figure.

Television has also spawned (germinated?) a fair share of bizarre plant life. At least two episodes of the original Star Trek series relied heavily on plants for their plot line: in one (This Side of Paradise), spores from a plant on a colonized planet induce perfect health and euphoria. Captain Kirk ruins this for everyone by discovering that testosterone-fueled rage counteracts the spores' effects. In The Way to Eden, a group of utopian idealists find their Eden planet, only to discover that its acid-filled plant life is fatal to humans. The series Farscape featured Zhaan, a sentient plant (and former Bond girl) who had renounced a life of crime to become a mystic and healer. On The X-Files, fungi (not plants, true, but close enough) were either killers (Firewalker) or hallucinogenic carnivores (Field Trip). By the way, the horticultural community has repaid television botanists with cultivars like Hosta 'Captain Kirk' and Hosta 'X-Files,' not to mention Iris 'Klingon Princess' and Hemerocallis 'Spock's Ears.'

J.R.R. Tolkein had a deep feeling for plants, and was probably a devoted gardener, if the numerous references to plants imaginary and real in The Lord of the Rings are any indication. His descriptions of the vegetation in Ithilien, for example, show a gardener's sensibility. But many of his creations – the Ents, the majestic mallorn, and athelas, or kingsfoil, grew only in his rich imagination. Trees were so important in his internal life that he ascribed a significant role to two of them in his extraordinary cosmology, detailed in The Silmarillion. Tolkein's fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis explored extraterrestrial botany in his science fiction trilogy, especially in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Plants play a more practical role in Harry Potter's chronicles, where Herbology is a required subject at Hogwarts, and where Hermione's knowledge of the Devil's Snare proved very useful. Mandrake root magically restores the victims in one episode, and in another, the Whomping Willow turns out to be a significant plot element, and not just a diverting, if violent, lawn ornament. The list goes on.

Cryptobotany -- the study of mythical and fantastic plants – can be a welcome diversion from the trials of real horticulture. After all, the worst thing that Audrey II or Devil's Snare or a Triffid can do to you is kill you. Leave it to a daphne or a rose or a meconopsis to break your heart.