Stories of giant man-eating trees or blood-sucking vines have become part of the SF/F/H genres to the point where we don’t really think about their origins much. fantasy has had plant creatures from the earliest days of dyrads and hamadryads. Horror and fairy tales provide us with gruesome creatures like the Leshy and the Jubokko. Science Fiction on the other hand is the late comer with the triffids of the 1950s.
But stories with a more scientific basis actually are older than John Wyndham or even the Pulps. Perhaps the first is “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, December 1844) by Nathaniel Hawthrone. Rappaccini is a medical researcher living in Padua. He has a daughter named Beatrice and papa ain’t too interested in her getting with the boys. to prevent this he injects her with plant poison making her lethal to touch. Enter Giovanni Guasconti, Beatrice’s lover, who joins her in the world of plant poison.
“Whether or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting up afresh to renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.” (“Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne)
When the pair take an antidote, Beatrice dies. Hawthorne, ever the writer of sin and guilt, examines the relationship between parents and children, and their transition to adulthood.
Hawthorne’s tale is based on an Indian legend but is clearly a Science Fiction piece since everything that happens in it is caused by science. And this is the metric by which plant monsters are classified. This is not a tale of ghosts or elves.
“Lost in a Pyramid or The Mummy’s Curse” (The New World, January 16 1869. by Louisa May Alcott is the next contender for this type of story, written twenty-five years later. Alcott was another American author. This association may have inspired A. Conan Doyle’s choice of title for a plant monster story in “The American’s Tale” (London Society, December 1880). Another element that becomes evident here is all three of these stories were published December/January, traditionally a time for ghost stories.
The plot of “Lost in a Pyramid” has Forsyth showing a jeweled box to his fiancee, Evelyn, then tells how he and Dr. Niles had been lost in a pyramid in Egypt. The box had come from the mummy of a sorceress. Forsyth had to burn the mummy to make smoke for his rescuers to find them. Forsyth won’t let his bride-to-be grow the ancients seeds, throwing them into the fire. One of the seeds is not destroyed. Dr. Niles grows the plant and wears the blossom.
“Much amazed, Forsyth followed her to her own little boudoir, and there, standing in the sunshine, was the unknown plant. Almost rank in their luxuriance were the vivid green leaves on the slender purple stems, and rising from the midst, one ghostly-white flower, shaped like the head of a hooded snake, with scarlet stamens like forked tongues, and on the petals glittered spots like dew.” (“Lost in a Pyramid” by Louisa May Alcott)
A telegram comes telling of Niles’ death, caused by the flower. Forsyth has married his bride but she does not look well. She too has grown a seed in secret and dies horribly like the doctor, the blossom consuming all her vitality.
This story really is the first monster plant seed story. The idea of the reproduction killer will (if you’ll excuse the pun) flower in the Pulps with jack snow and Clark Ashton Smith. Alcott’s blossom devours the wearer but there is no scientific explanation of how it does this. Despite this we can see this is a chemical process and not magic.
Only these two stories predated something that will change fiction for ever. Real explorations in South America in 1874 would spark a host of hoaxes and misinformation about actual plants that prayed on humans. (It would be revived in 1920.)
“The Madagascar Tree” by Edmund Spenser (South Australian Register, October 27, 1874)
“The Man-Eating Tree” by Anonymous (The Mercury, February 18, 1875)
The flood gates opened after this with writer like A. Conan Doyle, Julian Hawthorne, Edward Page Mitchell, H. G. Wells, Grant Allan, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman and George Griffiths all getting in on the plant monster craze. This rush of story gold would culminate in Frank Aubrey’s The Devil-Tree of Eldorado. But more on these next time…
