Possibly the one plant uglier than Neville's Mimbulus mimbletonia, bubotubers play a substantial comedic role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Liche's story, which was written up as a non-fiction travel account in the South Australian Register, was later found to be completely false. Always the straight-A student, Hermione remembered the way to combat the plant from a previous Herbology lesson.Ĭarnivorous trees have popped up now and again in various superstitious texts, including one outrageous tall tale invented by a 19th-century German explorer named Carl Liche who claimed to have seen an eight-foot-tall plant with long hairy tendrils pick up a woman-supposedly belonging to what was later deemed a fictional Malagasy tribe-and devour her whole. Buel (1889)/Wikimedia Commons.Īt the end of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Hermione saves Ron and Harry by defeating a dark and dampness-loving plant whose long tendrils wrap around its prey, choking it to death with a burst of "bluebell" flames from her wand. "Arbre Carnivore" from Sea and Land by J.W.
According to Valauskas, mandrakes were thought of and documented as having a human form-both male and female-since ancient times. He pointed out some examples of zoophytes in a book by 16th-century French botanist Claude Duret entitled Histoire Admirable des Plants, the most unusual of which is probably the vegetable lamb of tartary, a bush that grows a ferocious lamb as its fruit. As Ed Valauskas, curator of the rare books collection at Chicago Botanical Garden's Lenhardt Library, pointed out in his lecture on plants featured in the Harry Potter series, zoophytes, or plants that double as animals, were prevalent in Renaissance botanical lore. Rowling didn't completely invent the idea of a mandrake baby. The leaves were growing right out of his head." Professor Sprout adds to the group of intimidated students that the plant babies emit screams that are piercing enough to knock out wizards for hours.Įven though in real life mandrakes are not animals, but fully botanical members of the nightshade family Solanaceae, J.K. Here we get a description of the grotesque plant: "Instead of roots, a small, muddy, and extremely ugly baby popped out of the earth.
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In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Neville and his classmates' introduction to Herbology begins with a class about how to care for mandrakes, the professor first demonstrating how to unearth the strange plant-animals for repotting. Illustration from Anonymous 15th century manuscript Tacuinum Sanitatus/Wikimedia Commons.
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