Weird Plants
Chris Thorogood, Head of Science and Public Engagement, Oxford Botanic Garden & Arboretum
Our green planet is home to a dazzling diversity of plant species, hundreds of thousands of them. But we live in an age of ‘plant blindness’: compared with animals, we tend to think of plants as a little inanimate — even dull. And yet there is a bizarre, even sinister side to the plant world which most people aren’t aware even exists. A world in which plants steal from one another; trick, kidnap and even kill animals; a world of weird plants. Many are poorly known to science, have never been cultivated before; and some, no doubt, haven’t even been discovered yet. These weird plants are the ambassadors of the plant kingdom, challenging the perception that plants are dull. At Oxford Botanic Garden, we have started a collection of these plants to engage new people with plant science, and cure plant blindness.
Here are five you may scarcely have imagined could even exist.
A distant relative of the ironically beautiful peace lily, as its name suggests, the dead horse arum is more gruesome. It grows on cliff-tops above the Mediterranean among sea gull colonies. Here, the odour of regurgitated fish, gull droppings and dead chicks hangs in the air, as does the hum of bluebottle flies. The dead horse arum’s blooms resemble an animal corpse in both appearance and smell to capitalise on this bounty of flies, which it imprisons in a floral chamber overnight, where the insects collect and deliver pollen for the plant. If you dare, you can see the dead horse arum in bloom at Oxford Botanic Garden, where it flowers under glass, in early spring.
Hydnora is surely one of the strangest of all flowering plants. It lacks chlorophyll and steals its nutrients from the roots of euphorbias in the dry semi-deserts of southern Africa. It lives entirely underground until it blooms, often unpredictably, and smells like faeces to attract pollinating dung beetles. The formidable-looking jaw-like flowers of this ‘pavement pummeller’ can even burst through concrete, and cause significant damage to infrastructure. The plant is virtually unknown in cultivation, and is scarcely encountered, even by botanists. Oxford Botanic Garden is currently trialling cultivation of this ‘vegetable vampire’. Watch this space.
Rhizanthes is a bizarre plant would look more at home at the bottom of the sea than the rainforest floor. This rarely seen parasitic plant is devoid of all green pigment, leaves, stems and roots, and is completely dependent upon the roots of tropical vines for its nutrition. The flower resembles rotting meat to attract flies, and even produces heat to disperse its fragrance far and wide across the rainforest. Very little is known about the biology of this curious plant, and like many of the tropical parasitic plants, it is virtually unknown in cultivation.
The pelican flower (Aristolochia grandiflora) is one of the largest flowers of the New World. Its flowers hang on vines and attract flying insects. Upon alighting the lip of the flower, the insects crawl into a narrow tube clothed in dense downward-pointing hairs. These hairs are easy to slide down, but impossible to crawl up, leading the insects to become imprisoned in the suspended chamber. After a 24 hour suspended sentence, the hairs wither and unblock the escape passage, releasing the pollen-laden insects which are primed to fertilise the next pelican flower. A gigantic pelican flower bloomed for at Oxford Botanic Garden for first time this year.
A little more glamorous than the dead horse arums of this world, Psychotria elata is native to Central and South America. The lip-like structures are in fact a pair of bracts (the calyx) from which the true flowers later emerge. The extraordinarily accurate resemblance to luscious human lips to our eyes is in fact a coincidence; the flowers actually attract pollinating hummingbirds.
Dr Chris Thorogood is Head of Science and Public Engagement for Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum. His research focusses on speciation (the formation of species) in tropical pitcher plants and parasitic plants, and the floral diversity of biodiversity hotspots such as the Mediterranean Basin and Japan. His latest book is a popular title ‘Weird Plants’, published by Kew.
Follow Chris on Twitter @thorogoodchris1 and Instagram @illustratingbotanist.
What next?
Follow us here on Medium where we publish regularly.
If you liked this article please ‘applaud’ it to spread the word and help others find it.
Want to read more? Try our articles on Funbers 0, 1 and 1.4142…, Flowers and ink, and Seven things you (probably) didn’t know about Oxford’s libraries.
Are you a member of the University who wants to write for us on Medium? Get in touch with us here with your ideas: digicomms@admin.ox.ac.uk.
