Happy Monday, once more! And that means it’s time for Fantasy with Friends: all the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about fantastical plants:

What fantasy plants have stuck in your imagination? A plant with magical properties or a plant a character uses in a potion? What memorable ways does nature feature in fantasy?

My immediate answer is Caz and Meep, from Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop! I loved the idea of a sentient spider plant right from the start, and honestly for most of the story I was just wanting more of Caz, because it’s such a cool idea. I wasn’t as big a fan of The Spellshop in general as some are, but that part stuck with me!

Casting back a bit further, the other thing that weirdly popped into my head is the toffee tree in The Magician’s Nephew — the way it grew from Polly and Diggory’s remaining toffees, with magic all new in the land and so much potential that even a lamp post could grow… We don’t see the toffee plant in the books later in the chronology, and I always wondered what C.S. Lewis thought happened to it. If it were a story by Tolkien, I’d feel sure he knew (even if it never fitted into a story he actually got chance to tell), but less so with Lewis. Maybe he never thought about it again!

I’ve no real green thumb of my own, so I must admit that not a lot else sticks out in my memory! I’ll have to see what everyone else talks about to jog my memory on what I inevitably missed…