Sentient plants (Part Two) by Elizabeth Kay (Part One November 2021}

It all started with the triffids. Whether it’s science fiction, dystopia or fantasy, plants have a lot to offer from horror to humour.

I found John Wyndham’s creation absolutely terrifying. Mankind is rendered blind by a meteor shower, and the genetically-engineered triffids become the dominant species. They are equipped with a powerful sting that can kill, and they can uproot themselves and walk. It also becomes clear that they can communicate with one another.

The book was written in 1951, long before we knew anything about the relationship between fungus and trees, and the underground web that passes information back and forth just as efficiently as the internet. The more we know, the more we realise we don’t know, and the more we ought to realise that interfering with nature can have unexpected and usually unpleasant results. The saying In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king has been around for a long time, and certainly in Wyndham’s novel the people who were already blind fared a lot better than those who had just lost their sight. But, of course, the triffids fared best of all, as sight was a sense they had never possessed. It’s a very powerful post-apocalyptic novel, and as so often the book is a lot better than any film or tv series.

            Not all sentient plants are malign, however. When Aslan awakens C.S.Lewis’s Narnian trees they are both scary and a force for good.

 …Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild south-wester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you; and was no longer trees but huge people; yet still like trees because their long arms waved like branches and their heads tossed and leaves fell around them in showers…

Shakespeare thought of it first of course, because it’s Burnham Wood with extra bits. Lewis’s trees join in the feast at the end of Prince Caspian with their own bespoke menu. They started with a rich brown loam that looked like chocolate, followed by a pink soil, which was lighter; at the cheese stage they had a chalky soil and they finished with the finest gravels powdered with choice silver sand. Making earth sound delicious is quite a challenge. But this is the way you need to think, when you take the huge step of writing about not just a different animal, but a different kingdom. And plants are very different.

Tolkien had a go at sentient trees too. His Ents were the most ancient living creatures surviving in Middle-earth in the Third Age. They were the Shepherds of the Trees, and protected the forests from Orcs, Dwarves and other dangers. As luck would have it, Ents were created around the same time as the Elves, who gave them the desire to speak and taught them Elvish.

 And then, of course, there’s Terry Pratchett, in Reaper Man. 

"Wow.  That was a sharp one.”

“What was?”

“That winter just then.”

“Call that a winter?  When I was a sapling we had winters–”

Then the tree vanished.

After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: “He just went!  Just like that!  One day he was here, next he was gone!”

If the other trees had been humans, they would have shuffled their feet.

“It happens, lad,” said one of them, carefully.  “He’s been taken to a Better Place, you can be sure of that.  He was a good tree.”

The young tree, which was a mere five thousand, one hundred and eleven years old, said, “What sort of Better Place?”

“We’re not sure,” said one of the clump.  It trembled uneasily in a week-long gale.  “But we think it involves…sawdust.”

Since the trees were unable to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes…

I’ll just self-indulgently finish with an extract from Back to the Divide, which I’ve used before, but what the hell.

 A weird and wonderful plant was growing in a blue ceramic pot on the window ledge. It looked like a succulent of some sort – a desert plant, anyway. Its stem was thick, bulbous, swelling out like a beer belly beneath rolls of pale green flesh. If it had possessed a head instead of a coronet of spiky leaves it would have looked like a football-sized statue of a sumo wrestler, or a jade Buddha. In the middle of the coronet sat one bright red flower.

“Hello Socrates,” said Betony to the plant. “I haven’t seen you for ages.”

“Socrates?” queried Felix.

“What’s wrong with Socrates?” demanded the plant. “Good old-fashioned mythical name. Betony, I’m as dry as a fire-breather’s backside. Tansy’s awfully forgetful.”

Felix’s mouth dropped open.

Betony watered the plant, and then she went around lighting candles with a wave of her hand, muttering the incantation…

 "Are you just going to sit there reading, human?” demanded Socrates, dropping a dead leaf. “I thought I was going to have some interesting company for a change.”

Felix grinned. “Is Leona a real person?” he asked.

“She’s a riddle-paw.”

“What’s that?”

Socrates described Leona, and Felix realised that Leona was almost certainly a sphinx. This was definitely worth investigating; an accomplished sorceress was precisely what he needed.

“Why do you want a sorceress, anyway?” asked Socrates.

Felix told him everything.

“Hmm,” said Socrates, re-arranging a petal, “you’ve got a couple of root-tangling posers there, haven’t you?

 So let your imagination run riot. The orchids on my windowsill are an argumentative bunch, and the senior blueberry bush can be quite strict with the younger ones about flowering. And as for the Venus fly-trap…

(Apologies for the weird line spacing, which I just can't get right this time)