Heroic Fantasy offers sword-swingers all kinds of monsters to fight: dragons, harpies, ape creatures, just about anything you can imagine. The Sword & Sorcery hero (along with the Epic Fantasy hero) sometimes face off against killer plants. The history of the plant monster in Horror fiction dates back to 1869. Writers like Robert E. Howard were familiar with either the Victorian version or the Pulp version of these deadly green killers. It is only natural they should take seed in tales of the fantastic.
Plant Yothga
It is no surprise that our first example was created by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Sword & Sorcery. The Plant Yothga from “The Scarlet Citadel” (Weird Tales, January 1933) is Howard’s first of three. The Cimmerian is a prisoner in the Scarlet Citadel. He escapes his cell and finds Pelias in another chamber:
…He was looking into a broad cell, and a space of this was caged off with closely set bars extending from floor to ceiling, set firmly in the stone. Within these bars lay a figure, which, as he approached, he saw was either a man, or the exact likeness of a man, twined and bound about with the tendrils of a thick vine which seemed to grow through the solid stone of the floor. It was covered with strangely pointed leaves and crimson blossoms – not the satiny red of natural petals, but a livid, unnatural crimson, like a perversity of flower-life. Its clinging, pliant branches wound about the man’s naked body and limbs, seeming to caress his shrinking flesh with lustful avid kisses. One great blossom hovered exactly over his mouth. A low bestial moaning drooled from the loose lips; the head rolled as if in unbearable agony, and the eyes looked full at Conan. But there was no light of intelligence in them; they were blank, glassy, the eyes of an idiot.
Now the great crimson blossom dipped and pressed its petals over the writhing lips. The limbs of the wretch twisted in anguish; the tendrils of the plant quivered as if in ecstasy, vibrating their full snaky lengths. Waves of changing hues surged over them; their colour grew deeper, more venomous….
The plant Yothga fights back when Conan comes to kill it. Its blossoms spread like the hood of a cobra. Waves of its malignance emanate from it. Conan cuts the damned thing with a sword. A nasty white ooze dribbles out of the cut stem. Later Pelias, the plant’s victim, tells him that this is better than trying to pull it out since its roots reach all the way to hell.
Black Lotus
The Black Lotus “People of the Black Circle” (Weird Tales, September October November 1934) by Robert E. Howard is the second plant.
…A subtle perfume pervaded the atmosphere. It was the dread figure of the black lotus that had grown up as she watched, as it grows in the haunted, forbidden jungles of Khitai.
The broad leaves were murmurous with evil life. The blossoms bent toward her like sentient things, nodding serpentlike on pliant stems. Etched against soft, impenetrable darkness it loomed over her, gigantic, blackly visible in some mad way. Her brain reeled with the drugging scent and she sought to crawl from the dais.
The Black Lotus shows up here and elsewhere in the Conan Saga in stories like “The Slithering Shadow” where everyone in the city of Xuthul uses the plant to hide in dreams. Its noxious fumes are a classic element from stories like “The Orchid Horror” (1911). The smell alone is enough to knock someone out. Howard adds a narcotic factor that suggests the opium den. Robert Bloch wrote a story called “Black Lotus” after REH.
The Garden of Fear
“The Garden of Fear” (Marvel Tales, #2 July-August 1934) by Robert E. Howard is part of his James Allison series. Hunwulf tries to rescue his gal from a winged man living in a tower. The stairless structure is surrounded by the garden of the title. The red flowers all grow close together and move when there is no wind. The smell is not that of sickly sweetness but of the charnal house. Hunwulf, later changed to Conan in Conan the Barbarian #9 (September 1971), destroys the garden by stampeding a herd of mammoths over it.
With the scream of a lost soul the brown man hurtled downward, crashing among the flowers. And with a rustling hiss, they were on him. Their thick flexible stalks arched like the necks of serpents, their petals closed on his flesh. A hundred blossoms clung to him like the tentacles of an octopus, smothering and crushing him down. His shrieks of agony came muffled; he was completely hidden by the hissing, threshing flowers. Those beyond reach swayed and writhed furiously as if seeking to tear up their roots in their eagerness to join their brothers. All over the field the great red blossoms leaned and strained toward the spot where the grisly battle went on. The shrieks sank lower and lower and lower, and ceased. A dread silence reigned over the valley. The black man flapped his way leisurely back to the tower, and vanished within it.
Then presently the blossoms detached themselves one by one from their victim who lay very white and still. Aye, his whiteness was more than that of death; he was like a wax image, a staring effigy from which every drop of blood had been sucked. And a startling transmutation was evident in the flowers directly about him. Their stalks were no longer colorless; they were swollen and dark red, like transparent bamboos filled to the bursting with fresh blood.
The Flower-Women
“The Flower-Women” (Weird Tales, May 1935) by Clark Ashton Smith is a sequel to “The Maze of Maal Dweb” (Weird Tales, October 1938) which features some strange plants like metal trees. But in this tale we get the vampiric Flower-Women. These deadly but beautiful gals are being attacked by a race of reptilian baddies. Maal Dweb intervenes because, well, because he can. Smith wrote a style of Fantasy that wasn’t quite Sword & Sorcery but fun all the same. He wrote several plant Horror classics like “The Seed From the Sepulchre” (Weird Tales, October 1933) that predates The Ruins (2006) by decades.
As he went down the knoll into the valley, the enchanter heard an eerie, plaintive singing, like the voices of sirens who bewail some irremediable misfortune. The singing came from a sisterhood of unusual creatures, halfwoman and half-flower, that grew on the valley bottom beside a sleepy stream of purple water. There were several scores of these lovely and charming monsters, whose feminine bodies of pink and pearl reclined amid the vermilion velvet couches of billowing petals to which they were attached. These petals were borne on single, mattress-like leaves and heavy, short, well-rooted stems. The flowers were disposed in irregular circles, clustering thickly toward the center, and with open intervals in the outer rows.
Maal Dweb approached the flower-women with a certain caution; for he knew that they were vampires. Their arms ended in long tendrils, pale as ivory, swifter and more supple than the coils of darting serpents, with which they were wont to secure the unwary victims drawn by their singing. Of course, knowing in his wisdom the inexorable laws of nature, he felt no disapproval of such vampirism; but, on the other hand, he did not care to be its object.
Old Man Willow and the Huorns
Sword & Sorcery and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings have an interwoven history. Some readers don’t like to mix the two but fans like myself make no bones about liking both. Howard and Tolkien share many things including Giant Spiders. Also plant monsters. The LOTR films ditched Tom Bombadil but the angry trees, the Huorns like Old Man Willow, do make an appearance.
The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) by J. R. R. Tolkien gave us:
‘Put it out! Put it out!’ begged Merry. The branches of the willow began to sway violently. There was a sound as of a wind rising and spreading outwards to the branches of all the other trees round about, as though they had dropped a stone into the quiet slumber of the river valley and set up ripples of anger that ran out over the whole Forest. Sam kicked at the little fire and stamped out the sparks. But Frodo, without any clear idea of why he did so, or what he hoped for, ran along the path crying help! Help! help! It seemed to him that he could hardly hear the sound of his own shrill voice: it was blown away from him by the willow-wind and drowned in a clamour of leaves, as soon as the words left his mouth. He felt desperate: lost and witless.
He then seized Merry’s feet and drew him out of the suddenly widening crack. There was a tearing creak and the other crack split open, and out of it Pippin sprang, as if he had been kicked. Then with a loud snap both cracks closed fast again. A shudder ran through the tree from root to tip, and complete silence fell.
The Ents
More interesting are the tree-herders who keep an eye on the Huorns. The ents from The Two Towers (1954) by J. R. Tolkien, are led by Treebeard. The ents are walking, talking tree people. Merry and Pippin have the hard job of waiting through the Entmoot, or council of the ents, only to be turned down. The ents change their mind and attack the forces of Saruman.
They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a large Manlike, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each.The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them.
The Kulamtu
We return to the tales of Conan but not written by Robert E. Howard. L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter produced a number of sequels (including novels). The Kulamtu are killer trees that appear in Conan the Buccanneer (1971). Conan and the other pirates have heard rumors of the Kulamtu. They fall foul of the Amazons and get sacrificed to the killer veg. Conan takes out the Kulamtu by pulling them up by the roots then slamming them into his enemies.
Another odd thing was the clump of trees in the centre of the sandy floor. These must be the kulamtu trees of which Queen Nzinga had spoken. He looked the nearest one over and found it unlike any tree he had ever seen, although it had some faint resemblance to a banana tree. The trunk had a spongy, fibrous look; but, instead of tapering to a point, it ended at the top in a round, wet-looking orifice, like a mouth. Below this orifice grew a circle of huge leaves, each one as large as a man–long, broad, and thick, with their upper surfaces covered with hairlike projections a finger’s breadth in length.…One of the huge leaves of the kulamtu tree had reached down and was curling slowly around his ankle. Chabela screamed again, and Conan looked to see her limbs enfolded in the frond of another tree….
Now he paled beneath his swarthy tan, for he understood the litter of dry, white human bones about the bases of these trees. The sticky fronds would curl slowly about his body, jerkily lift him up to that obscene-looking orifice, and pop him in. The devil-tree would swallow him alive. The acids secreted by the inner tissues would dissolve his flesh, and the tree would finally regurgitate his bare bones. Three of the big fronds had curled about his body now, despite his thrashings and efforts to roll away. Slowly, they heaved him upright. Every one of the hairlike projections on the leaves stung like a hornet’s sting where it touched him. Terror and revulsion lent new strength to his powerful muscles.
The Garden of Death
Kothar and the Conjurer’s Curse (1970) by Gardner F. Fox is part of the Kothar series but it was adapted by Marvel Comics as a Conan comic. (Norvell W. Page’s Wan Tengri novels also appeared this way.) While Kothar spars with a deadly sea monster he also has to ward off the blood-seeking garden of scabby plants.
Kothar stared at a graveled pathway that wound between strange trees and curious plants and flowers, upward along a hill. The petals of those plants and flowers were pulpy, appearing half rotten, and the stalks on which they nodded were scabrous and covered with bloated white fungi. The barbarian snorted. “It has the look of a garden of the dead,” he muttered, “where the roots are sunk deep into the corpses of men and women.”….His sword was not Frostfire, but the barbarian brought it out into his hand, shifting the inert body of Stefanya to his left shoulder where he clamped a hand on her. When a flower or a plant swayed too close, he used the steel to slash it, leaving a bloated corruption that rotted and decayed even as they walked away from it…Where the shadow of the seabeast fell on the bloated plants and flowers and the scabrous trees, those strange life organisms quivered and shook. They raised petals and pistils, leaves and stalks upward toward the writhing neck and the huge head above them as if they would fasten leechlike pores on that slug-like thing and drink its blood.
The Witch-apple
De Camp and Carter, Fox and another later S&S writer used weird plants: John Jakes and his Brak the Barbarian. Jakes opens “Ghoul’s Garden” with Brak rescuing some travelers from a classic killer tree. Frank Frazetta did an amazing cover image for Flashing Swords #2 showing this encounter. The cover wasn’t used on the paperback, only the hard cover. This is okay because Frank did another masterpiece for the paperback.
The Witch-apple in “Ghoul’s Garden” (Flashing Swords! #2, 1973) by John Jakes
The brown odor rose sickeningly. The big barbarian dropped the broadsword and tore at the creeper with both hands, tore and tore, wounding his own flesh with his yellow-thick nails. He couldn’t stop. The compulsion to get the awful thing away from him was like a bewitchment.
At last he broke the hold. Beneath its bark the creeper felt alive, muscled. He stamped on it when it fell, then picked it up and threw it away like a still-writhing serpent. Panting, he dove for his broadsword as another creeper, then two, lashed at his shoulder. He dodged away.
“What kind of a hell’s tree—?” he half screamed to the girl.
“Witch-apple,” she cried back. “The friar and I were traveling together—we walked too close—”
You would expect the Witch-apple to be in the ghoul’s garden but this is not the case. The danger in the garden is actually killer birds.
The Siren Tree
Epic Fantasy returns with the Siren from Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara (1977):
At the peak of a particularly bleak rise, somewhat higher than the surrounding hillocks, Menion found her sitting beneath a small twisted tree with long, gnarled branches that reminded him of willow roots. She was a young girl, very beautiful and obviously very much at home in these lands as she sang brightly, seemingly oblivious to anyone who might be attracted by the sound of her voice. He did not conceal his approach, but moved straight to her side, smiling gently at her freshness and youth. She smiled back at him, but made no effort to rise nor to greet him, continuing the gay strains of the tune she had been singing all this time. The Prince of Leah came to a halt several feet away from her, but she quickly beckoned him to come closer and sit next to her beneath the oddshaped tree…In that instant the girl and the song disappeared into vapor, leaving Menion to face the strange-looking tree on the barren rise.
For one second Menion hesitated, unable to believe what had just occurred, and then hastily moved to withdraw. But the loose ground about his feet opened even as he paused, releasing a heavy cluster of thick-gnarled roots which wound themselves tightly about the young man’s ankles, holding him fast…The strangeness of the situation increased almost immediately as he glanced up to see the strange rootlimbed tree, previously immobile, approaching in a slow, stretching motion, its limbs extended toward him, their tips containing small but deadly looking needles.
Terry Brooks has taken a lot of grief over the closeness between his first novel and The Lord of the Rings but this creature has a different inspiration. Stanley G. Weinbaum placed a very similar mirage plant on his version of Mars in “A Martian Odyssey” (Wonder Stories, July 1934). In that story, it is Tweel who rescues the hero, not the dwarf Hendel. The killer tree isn’t all that important to the novel but it did give Hendel a chance to make a dramatic entrance.
Conclusion
Heroic fantasy easily incorporated plant creatures into its web of magical creatures. I would point out that L. Frank Baum did it well ahead of either Tolkien or Howard. The killer trees in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1901) starts of a new century with some good old-fashioned killer trees.
The Scarecrow, who was in the lead, finally discovered a big tree with such wide-spreading branches that there was room for the party to pass underneath. So he walked forward to the tree, but just as he came under the first branches they bent down and twined around him, and the next minute he was raised from the ground and flung headlong among his fellow travelers.
That such an image would be included in a children’s story shows the universal feeling humans have for trees and other plants. The fact that branches look like arms and trunks like torsos has contributed to such monsters in fantastic stories. Those little kiddies would smile with recognition when they became Pulp readers in the decades to come and encountered these nasty vegetables again.
NB. Love plants and S&S, check out Bearshirt #3: The Tears of Y’Lala! Plant monsters and an underground city!
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