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…
I can’t even think of any other sentient plants!
There’s probably some out there, though the ones I can think of are more in sci-fi or horror…
That’s got me wondering what I’d most like to plant rather than toffees… 🙂
calypte recently posted…Preaching to the Choir – Adrian Tchaikovsky
For me, I guess it’d have to be these chocolate wafers I’ve been so obsessed with, ahaha.
I’ve mostly read books with killer plants (what a shocker!) so I probably wouldn’t be able to come up with a long list, lol.
No, you?! Really?!
I couldn’t really think about anything for this post, but I’d completely forgot about Caz and Meep, the whole book wasn’t a complete win for me but I did love those two. Great post 🙂
Same! They were awesome.
My first thought is the screaming baby plants from Harry Potter (which I can’t think of the name of right now)
Brittany @ Perfectly Tolerable recently posted…Top Ten Tuesday – Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years
Ah, yeah. I don’t really like to talk/think about that series these days on my blog, given the attitude of Rowling toward trans people.