Plants You’ve Never Seen Before
Baobab: Native to Madagascar, Africa, and India, these wide-based and tall-trunked trees are the only perennial plants on Earth with thunder thighs.
Buddha’s Hand: The Buddha’s hand is traditionally given as religious offering at Buddhist temples because the fruit’s fingers are said to look like Buddha’s hands while praying …to Cthulhu.
Cashew Fruit: For some reason, nobody talks about the fact that these fruit seasonally turtle-head their cashews for us to pinch off and eat.
Durian: This exotic fruit has a strong and uniquely divisive smell that fills some people with deep appreciation while filling others with soon-to-be vomit. That’s why the durian has both the nicknames “King of Fruit” and “Get It Away From Me.”
Hala Fruit: The buoyant phalanges of the Pacific Island hala fruit can remain potent for many months before taking root on some distant shore. Like a message made of fruit in a bottle made of fruit.
Dragon Tree: The fact that this tree looks like a mushroom isn’t the weirdest thing about it. Its sap is blood red, making any cut through its bark eerily reminiscent of cutting into flesh.
Tacca Chantrieri: The leaves of this blasphemously eldritch plant span up to 12 inches across with whiskers up to 28 inches long, which will make these plants easy to pull out of the sky should their nightmare-bat appearance ever prove to be more than a mere resemblance.
Serracenia Oreophila: The hairs inside each cup’s mouth trap bugs inside where digestive juices break them down into nutrients, because each blossom of this abomination is also a stomach.
Welwitschia Mirabilis: This plant can live up to 1,500 years, needing only the moisture from dew to survive and look like a perfectly healthy undead octopus.
Jabuticaba: The Jabuticaba looks like it’s covered in a bubbling rash or 3rd degree burns, but the fruit of this tree actually grows directly out of its branches. To date, this is the only delicious rash ever discovered.
Horned Melon: The horned melon is the ancestor of today’s melons and looks like photosynthesizing blowfish.
Romanesco Broccoli: Finally, a vegetable that caters to the OCD veggie lover. The naturally occurring fractal patterns in this cousin of the cauliflower make this the most mathematic thing you could put in a salad other than a TI-84 calculator.
Rafflesia: The only part of this plant that ever sees the light of day is its large eye-of-Sauron-esque flower, which can grow more than 100 centimeters across (39 inches). The reason all you can see is the flower is because the roots of the parasitic Rafflesia live completely within the roots of another plant. Like Oprah’s husband. (Just kidding, I’m sure he’s great/Is Oprah married)
Titan Arum: Growing to around 3 meters high and 3 meters in circumference, the titan arum would be beautiful if it didn’t smell like a decomposing mummy fart. Its nickname is “the corpse flower,” and it attracts the same insects that would infest said mummy flatulence.