A Field Guide to Monster Plants

Approximately 300 million years before our early ancestors shed their fins and ventured onto land from the sea, some of the earliest plants were already busy figuring out terrestrial life. These first plants were leafless and looked more like bare green twigs, but were plants nonetheless, and eventually evolved into liverworts, ferns, and horsetails.​​¹ Flowers emerged much later from vascular plants in the Cretaceous period (145–66 million years ago). It is widely believed that plants developed flowers and fruits as a means to beguile mobile animals into dispersing their seeds. As humans are relative newcomers on this planet, it would still be another 40 million years or so until this strategy would come to include even our earliest ape relatives. Flowering and fruiting plants (angiosperms) became the dominant type of plant on Earth and continue to be so today. Certainly, fruits and vegetables developed specifically in order to attract animals to consume them, and the success of this strategy is evident. As Micheal Pollan argues in the book The Botany of Desire, our relationship with food plants, a result of this co-evolution, brings to question the human-centered concept of ‘domestication,’ something that food plants could just as easily be said to have done to us.​​² After all, plants are by numbers the dominant form of life on Earth, even in the “age of the Anthropocene,” making up 99.7 percent of the earth’s biomass.​​³

Embedded in the following text is a series of plant-based anthotype images that were created using some commonly cultivated vegetables including spinach, beets, cabbage, and onion. These foods were rendered into an emulsion and exposed to the sun to create images of plant monsters featured in films of the 1950s and 60s. This idea of a vegetable menace emerged in the Hollywood imaginary post-WW2, yet these monsters embody larger meanings: assertions of colonial power, war, racism, and nation states, rooted in ideals that have fundamentally shaped dominant agricultural systems in western culture. Here I will argue that the “good” and “bad” dichotomy ascribed to plants in these fictions comes from a violent and oppressive vision of the more-than-human world. 

Monsters of Modernity

At the turn of the last century, mysterious and sometimes-dangerous plants were suddenly a pre-occupation of a particular class of European mind. Theorists have proposed that anxieties at that time around more-than-human others may have, at least in part, derived from Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had changed the study of life by situating humans on a taxonomical scale together with animals. These ideas introduced the concept of common ancestry and created a general uneasiness and fear of degeneracy in the collective consciousness of European modernity.​​⁴ Simultaneously, accounts of monster plants, typically written as first-person narratives and detailing travels and encounters with previously unknown plant species in distant locales, were prevalent due to European interest in exotic fora. As bioprospecting of this type was an integral part of the colonial project, often these stories were racist projections of superiority, and the authors—either involved in or fashioning themselves after colonial explorations—would frame both the Indigenous peoples and the native fora and fauna they encountered as equally wild, fearsome, and in need of “civilizing.” 

Control and power figure prominently in the history of Euro-western relationships with plants, evidenced by the ways in which agricultural species have been instrumentalized for centuries in colonial projects as both a weapon and a target: as integral tools used in the projects of building nations and empires to demarcate and change landscapes, and through species selection and obliteration—to illustrate specific cultural ideologies.​​⁵

This collision of ideas, involving evolution and anxiety, Empire and fear, spawned at the time what has been described by scholar T.S. Miller as a “tedium” of man-eating plant stories, in which plants of various kinds are “discovered” by, and then devour, amateur “gentlemen scientists” and plant collectors.​​⁶ While some were written as entertainment and fiction, others were meant to be read as factual, for example published as letters in newspapers, which sparked debate. The popular film and Broadway musical franchise The Little Shop of Horrors is based partly on the short story “Green Thoughts,” written in 1932 by John Collier. In “Green Thoughts,” an unusual plant specimen devours an amateur botanist and several other victims in his home greenhouse, leaving only ghostly likenesses of the victims embedded in its leaves. In the 1960 film Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey II is a large plant of mysterious origins that feeds on blood and flesh. Visually, the plant was designed to resemble a cross between a Venus flytrap and a butterwort (both carnivorous plants), with shark-like teeth. Unlike typical carnivorous plants, Audrey is particularly interested in human flesh. Its appetite is insatiable, and it grows at an enormous rate. Perhaps monster plants in horror fiction such as this one represent a kind of lasting colonial paranoia: uncontrollable weeds with their own agenda to colonize the planet and dominate humanity. In this imaginary, left unchecked, plants assert their dominant position on the green planet, forcing the question: what would happen if plants had recognizable agency? “What if what we eat may not want to be eaten and may in fact eat us back?”​​⁷

Fields of Monsters

The condition of plant subjects and agricultural revolt is one of the themes of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, which was adapted into a film in 1962. In the story, triffids are large plants of unknown origin that have become important for oil production.​​⁸ While little is known about them at the onset of the story, triffids are eventually found to be dangerous; not only can they ambulate, but they also possess stingers that can harm or kill a person. Humans, though, are unable to resist the economic potential of these plants and normalize the dangers inherent to triffid cultivation. When humans suddenly and simultaneously lose the ability to see, the triffids, “adapted to a sightless existence” (as all plants are), become the dominant species.​​⁹ This narrative illustrates both our dependence on plants for food and energy, as well as the precarity of our perceived superior position over the plant species we rely on for survival. Like all plants, the triffids have an intelligence—they communicate—but their means and methods are otherworldly and inaccessible. Triffid reproduction also becomes totally uncontrolled and goes feral. One passage describes clouds of floating seeds, like a white vapour spreading across seas and land.​​¹⁰ In ecological terms, “feral” species are those that live in the wild but are descendants of domesticated, or agricultural plants. Not surprisingly, many so-called “weeds” are in fact simply feral species, who—like the fictional triffids—have escaped agricultural control. Indeed it has been noted that negative terminology towards such ‘weed’ plants as invasive, alien, etc. is often a matter of discipline and control; if such crops would stay in their place, as workers, laborers, providers and commodities, they would be tolerated.​​¹¹ However, upon escape they change categories and become uninvited, enemies that ultimately must be put to death. 

Enemy Plants

Cultural theorists and conservationists alike have long expressed concern with the inherent xenophobia that terms such as ‘alien,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘invasive,’ tend to evoke, including the name of the very field in which these terms are employed: ‘Invasion Biology.’​​¹² The language and rhetoric of war used to describe weeds as ‘enemies’ in some form or another is not just found in fiction. ‘Weed killers’ or chemical herbicides were not initially developed for commercial use or for large-scale farming, but by nations as technologies of war.​​¹³Herbicidal warfare was imagined and deployed as a form of scorched-earth military strategy, with the goal to defoliate entire forests of vegetation where enemies might hide, and/or to deplete their food crops. During WW2, groups of scientists working for the United States and British governments discovered systemic or hormone herbicides such as 2,4-D, and 2,4,5-T. These herbicides control plant growth, destroying all broadleaf plants while leaving grasses, including many crop plants, intact. Such herbicides were not used during WW2 as originally intended, but this new technology essentially started an agricultural revolution and invented modern weed science as we know it today. In 1945, as the war ended, they became commercially available, and thus “a new industry was born.”​​¹⁴

Like the chemicals themselves, the associated “enemy” rhetoric was used on weeds, and in the following years there were a number of popular science-fiction horror films featuring man-eating and monstrous plants as the antagonists. The 1951 film The Thing from Another World, as well as the 1956 film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, feature plant monsters that have since been understood as allegories for the contemporaneous political climate in the United States, particularly its pervasive Cold-War paranoia of the Communist other.​​¹⁵ In The Thing an advanced alien lifeform—plant-based, human-shaped, carnivorous—arrives to the North Pole (the Arctic being an area of Soviet-US contention) and attempts to reproduce itself. In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, rather than being carnivorous, the plant-alien ‘snatchers’ or ‘pod people’ replicate and replace humans, and prove more proficient and successful than humans at survival. In an analysis of the film, Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari note that, by lacking human consciousness, these “replacement plants” in human bodies represent beings without individuality, who are conformist and more efficient at surviving and multiplying.​​¹⁶ The ‘evil’ plants here are allegories for ruthless and unfeeling enemy others in the real politics of the time. 

After 2,4-D was declared to be safe to humans, it became (and remains) one of the most widely used commercial and agricultural herbicides globally, and both the British and the American governments continued to experiment with the military potential of these herbicides. During the Vietnam War, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T were combined in high concentrations to make Agent Orange, which was later found to have devastating and long-lasting health effects on the land and people, as well as on the soldiers who deployed it. Orange was only one part of the larger military operation called “Operation Ranch Hand” which deployed a number of similar chemicals, called the “Rainbow Herbicides” and included ‘agents’ green, pink, purple, blue and more.​​¹⁷ Most of these chemicals were produced by the chemical companies Dow and Monsanto. 

Invasion of the Superweeds

Perhaps the most infamous chemical manufacturer working in the agricultural sector, Monsanto was a long-operating American corporation, established in 1901 and bought by Bayer in 2018.​​¹⁸ In the 1970s, following the Vietnam War, Monsanto moved its focus from hormone herbicides towards glyphosate herbicides, to which they held the exclusive patent for nearly 30 years under the brand name Roundup. Glyphosate herbicides were marketed as a safer option as they were made of an organic compound, one that inhibits plant growth overall. They are now one of the most widely used herbicides globally. 

This year, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto opened with a much-anticipated feature by Canadian documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, Into the Weeds: Dewayne ‘Lee’ Johnson vs. Monsanto Company. Into the Weeds follows the story of Johnson, a former groundskeeper who received a terminal cancer diagnosis attributed to his use of the ubiquitous glyphosate herbicide Roundup at work, which Johnson says he was promised was “safe enough to drink.” Into the Weeds focuses on Johnson as the public face of a large and successful class-action lawsuit which argued that not only is this herbicide carcinogenic, but that Monsanto was aware of its potentially dangerous effects and lobbied extensively and successfully to minimize that information.​​¹⁹

It is interesting—if alarming—to note that Into the Weeds was released in 2022, exactly 60 years after the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book that has been described as a catalyst for the grassroots environmentalism that became part of the larger cultural consciousness in North America from the 1960s onwards.​​²⁰ Carson set out to prove through her writing and research that a widely used, common agricultural pesticide called DDT was not only killing the pests that affected crops but was also poisoning the air, waters, soil, and essentially all living things that it came into contact with. Carson’s book continues to be a cultural touchstone and important work 60 years on. While the DDT chemicals featured in Silent Spring have been banned from use, the fight against widespread chemical pollution, particularly around chemical inputs for agriculture, continues.​​²¹

Baichwal’s film documents an important ‘David and Goliath’ victory. However, such incidents do not instigate a widespread shift in approaches to farming with chemical inputs. Instead, problem chemicals tend to simply be replaced with others that are promised as safer. Herbicides continue to be used intensely, and the mode of agriculture that requires this kind of mitigation and chemical inputs has only become more dependent on them.​​²²

Roundup and other glyphosate herbicides are heavily and sometimes exclusively relied on in contemporary agriculture to clean or burn the fields, ‘clean’ referring to a field in which the only plant left is the desired crop. But with this scale and intensity, new plant monsters have emerged: superweeds. Superweeds are not fiction but are massive, fast-growing, herbicide-resistant weed plants, and there have been a growing number of species developing this trait over the past 20 years. They now number in the hundreds. ‘Pigweed’ or Palmer Amaranth and ‘Giant Ragweed’ or Ambrosia trifida (a Latin name with an eerie resemblance to the triffids in John Wyndham’s novel) are two well-known species of superweed. Both are large, growing 6ft tall or more; a giant ragweed plant can grow up to 20ft tall, while pigweed grows faster than most plants and develops resistance to herbicides more quickly too. The solution to superweeds for many is to introduce different and more deadly chemicals, often in combination: a dangerous, temporary, and desperate measure. Farmers and scientists alike have warned that at some point the chemical treadmill—the race to stay ahead of pests and weeds through these technologies, will run out of solutions and stop, and farming—thus food—will become very expensive.​​²³

Transformations

Agricultural systems based in biodiversity and developed over millennia by Indigenous, traditional, and smallholder farmers around the world have adapted to and integrated with their local environments, and already resist relying on contemporary mechanizations and chemical inputs out of necessity. Agroecology, as an approach, promotes learning from the ecological rationales and systems that such traditional farmers have developed and/or inherited throughout centuries. Viewed as a starting point for healing agricultural systems, this is more than simply adapting or integrating a set of methods; agroecological practices represent principals or ways of thinking that are both biodiverse and adaptable, as they have emerged through centuries of cultural and biological co-evolution.​​²⁴ Author and Agroecologist Liz Carlisle’s 2022 book Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming looks at farming methods that regenerate and restore biodiversity, practiced by Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers whose methods and traditions have been suppressed by industrial agriculture for far too long. Carlisle examines these methods in relation to the current focus from governments and industry on ‘regenerative agriculture’ as a promising method to both improve soil health and sequester carbon in the soil to mitigate climate change, warning that this may be co-opted by industry as a technological approach that is ‘regenerative’ in name but not in principle. Carlisle argues that re-imagining agriculture and, by extension, our relationships with food plants is possible by examining and learning from existing farming systems that persist on the margins of industrial agriculture, those that represent a different philosophical approach to relations with the land and its resident plants: one of care and reciprocity, devoid of enemies and monsters. 

Truly regenerating the web of relationships that support both our food system and our planet is going to take more than compost. We’re going to have to question the very concept of agriculture, and the bundle of assumptions that travel with the English word farm. What is the objective of this activity? To convert plants into money? Or to foster the health of all beings?​​²⁵

Indeed, amidst the global environmental crisis, climate instability, depleting soil resources, and growing population to feed, alternatives to dominant agricultural systems and ways of thinking about relationships with food, including the plants that we eat, are urgently needed. It’s not just a matter of adapting, enhancing, or tweaking; imaginations themselves must fundamentally change. 

Amanda White (she/her) is a white settler artist and scholar, living and working on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishinaabe, Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee peoples in Toronto. Amanda is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating, Department of Visual Art, Western University. Her current work is focused on plants, food, and environmental justice. amandawhite.com 

1. David J. Beerling, The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
2. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001), xvi.
3. Stefano Mancuso, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015).
4. T.S. Miller, “Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies,” The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23, no. 3 (2012): 460–79.
5. Jill Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005).
6. Miller, “Lives of the Monster Plants.”
7. Miller, “Lives of the Monster Plants,” 465.
8. They are speculated to have come from either Russia or outer space, which at the time equally stood in for the unknown.
9. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (New York: Del Rey / Ballantine Books, 1951), 33.
10. Wyndham, Day of the Triffids, 24.
11. Banu Subramaniam, “The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasion,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2001, vol. 2, no. 1, 26-40.
12. In addition to Subramaniam, this literature is cited extensively in: Marco Antonsich, “Natives and Aliens: Who and What Belongs in Nature and in the Nation?” Area 53 2021, (2): 303–10; Charles R. Warren, “Beyond ‘Native V. Alien’: Critiques of the Native/alien Paradigm in the Anthropocene, and Their Implications,” Ethics, Policy & Environment, 2021.
13. The same is true for chemical pesticides.
14. James Troyer, “In the beginning: the multiple discovery of the first hormone herbicides,” Weed Science, (2001) 49 (2): 290–297, 294.
15. David Wood, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” archived 2009-01-29 at the Wayback Machine BBC, May 1, 2001, https://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2001/05/01/invasion_of_the_body_snatchers_1956_review.shtm.
16. Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, “From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants: Plant Horror, Politics, and Vegetal Ontology,” Discourse, 34, no. 1 (2012): 32–58.
17. Jeanne Stellman, et al., “The Extent and Pattern of Usage of Agent Orange and Other Herbicides in Vietnam,” Nature, vol 422, 681.
18. Monsanto manufactured a number of chemicals, including DDT and PCBs, that have since been banned for their health impacts.
19. Johnson’s story and the details of the mass tort for which he became the public face are also detailed in the book The Monsanto Papers by Carey Gillam, Island Press, 2021.
20. While Silent Spring played an important role in the history of North American popular environmental movements, “environmentalism” is not one movement and has taken many shapes and encompassed many ethoses, philosophies, and ideas over the decades since.
21. DDT was produced by a number of chemical companies, including Monsanto.
22. For instance, when Monsanto’s patent on glyphosates was near its expiration, they shifted patent focus to the plants themselves, introducing the now infamous “Roundup ready” crop seeds, genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup chemicals, thus allowing farmers to spray their fields indiscriminately, and more frequently, without fear of destroying the crops.
23. Claire H. Brown, “Attack of the Superweeds,” New York Times Magazine, online, Aug 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/magazine/superweeds-monsanto.html.
24. Peter Rosset, and Miguel Altieri, Agroecology: Science and Politics (Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing, 2017).
25. Liz Carlisle, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2022), 15.

This article is published in issue 39.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue