From forest to terror: gothic and perverse tales about the plant world

The anthology Botanical Gothic (Impedimenta) covers more than a century of stories from Western literature , beginning with Nathaniel Hawthorne and ending with Zenna Henderson in the mid-20th century. The selected stories combine the everyday with the marvelous, with what is not rationally expected, as they personify plants and trees, imbuing them with human reactions that go beyond the conceivable.

It is no surprise, then, that the book contains words like "gothic" and "perverse" in its title, since these plant specimens and their reactions, being unknown, are frightening.

The prologuist speaks of " an endless array of fetid creatures or those capable of exhaling intoxicating fragrances, inert, prehensile, creeping, climbing, vengeful, spiteful, sometimes half-human, sometimes half-spectral." All these varieties appear and recur in the different stories.

And while we know that they also have their good and useful side, as they provide us with sustenance and healing, the truth is that the secret they hide turns the plant world into a source of legends, wonderful tales, superstitions and, at one extreme of incomprehension, gothic horror .

However, in many of the stories there is a sense of camaraderie in the relationship between humans and the plant world that can be considered a clear precursor to how environmentalism will develop.

If it were true that the plant world has the five human senses and fifteen more, we would understand why very few people are able to communicate with plants and yet the possibility of achieving this is an undoubted challenge for literary minds .

Roald Dahl takes up the challenge and attempts to connect in "The Sound Machine" (1949). But the inventor is driven mad by anguish upon hearing the cries of pain from flowers when they are picked or from trees when they are cut down, and he is powerless to help them given the incomprehension of the rest of the world.

Therefore, the trees decide to respond themselves to the vandalism that decimates them, as in Alphonse Daudet 's story "Wood'stown" (1873), in which the forest recovers its "place on the riverbank and five kilometers of gigantic trees" that had been cut down by "insolent" citizens.

The same thing happens in "Victory of the Green Brothers" (1948) by Polish author Maria Moravsky , where the trees organize an "invading army", just as the ivy does in "The Ivy War" (1930) by David H. Keller.

Trees defend themselves by creating punctual tornadoes "with maniacal fury" or by falling lethally on their aggressor at the opportune moment in "A Curtain of Leaves" (1941), by Eudora Welty .

In "The Oak" (1928), the Englishwoman Richmal Crompton , known for her William Brown books, inscribes the most perverse facet of that tree, as does the ineffable HP Lovecraft in collaboration with DW Rimel in "The Tree on the Hill" (1934), where the human "fights between the insane desire to return to the place of the cryptic tree" and "the frantic fear" of meeting it.

Flowers also attract and repel . Orchids can have "a sinister air" ("Green Pansies," John Collier , 1932) or present a deceptive display of color and vitality, as in Merrick White 's "The Purple Terror," in which the title foreshadows the ending.

There are also examples of conciliatory metamorphoses, such as in The Tree Wife (1950) by another American, Mary Elizabeth Counselman , a theme present in many mythologies. If the idea appeals to you, be sure to read The Vegetarian , a novel by Korean author Han Kang , winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Botanical Gothic (tales of a perverse greenness) , VV AA (Impedimenta).

© MS M. Suárez Lafuente / Prensa Ibérica - April