It cannot be denied that the closer a human being comes into proximity with a plant, the more unlovely and unsettling the plant becomes. This is why it is impossible to trust anyone who owns houseplants; they are unstable and untrustworthy people, and there is something eldritch hiding just behind their faces. Plants are a parody of sentience. They sway passively in the wind while emitting secret poisons and secretly burrowing roots downward to hold the sweet earth captive in their clenched, woody fists.
While all plants are unwholesome and wrong in their own way, I have confined myself here to the sort of plants an average resident of North America might encounter in the course of an ordinary day. Mangrove trees and corpse flowers may be mangled presents flung up from the belly of the steaming earth by the devil himself, but most of us are blessedly free from coming across them on our way to work. Here, then, in no particular order, are eleven of the worst plants in the world.
1. Sunflowers
A sunflower is, for reasons that are totally opaque to me, generally associated with sunshine and openness and loveliness, much in the same way that butterflies are often mistaken for something beautiful. Have you ever looked at a butterfly? Leave the wings out of it; it is a wretched and a hairy and a twitching body with too many darting legs and antennae whizzing out of its thorax, just like any other bug. A sunflower is too big and heavy by half. It looks like the severed head of a blonde man. No plant should contain so much mass. The stem is fuzzy, which is disgusting, the central cluster is a hypnotizing clot of spirals that resembles the Eye of Sauron vainly attempting to look cheerful. It’s thick and sinister, but tries to disguise itself as something pleasing to the eye, like a dead woman whose smiling mouth is a jagged slash of blood and lipstick. I do not accept your false and charmless attempts at levity. You are a bad plant, and you have no right to grow as tall as you do. I am a human; I stand above you on the food chain. How dare you grow as tall as me.
2. Australian Palm Trees
Your precious palm trees are not safe here. I will freely admit that there are several varieties of palm tree I find wholly unobjectionable, even enjoyable to look at. But the Australian palm tree resembles nothing so much as a squat, frond-feathered tarantula hulking atop a pole waiting to strike. It is beastly. Perhaps the worst tendency of any tree is the palm tree’s inability to simply shed its fronds in a normal fashion; instead the bottom layer withers and frays into a brown corpse, then sags lower and lower to the ground until the trunk itself is nearly obscured from view, like Miss Havisham wrapped in her ancient wedding ground, in a mockery of fertility, of growth, of life itself.
3. Yucca
Utterly, utterly loathsome. Why is the bottom a hazardous nest of spikes and sticks, while the top is a nauseating puff of white fuzz? Whither so tall? What colors run riot here? Sickly facsimiles of green, pungent half-dead attempts at brown. This is a corpse attempting to revive itself. I would take a flamethrower to the entire San Joaquin valley if I could rid the country of them.
4. Tree Cholla cactus
MOLD. MOLD. MOLD. IT IS A CACTUS WRAPPED IN MOLD SPEWING ITSELF FORTH FROM THE DIRT. KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT.
5. Trailing succulents
All succulents are an abomination. Fat, thick, loathsome, fuzz-ridden mockeries of everything that a true plant out to be. They put one in mind of The Island of Dr. Moreau, caught horribly between plant and beast. This variety, however, is particularly disgusting; you have seen them in the kind of home that is coated in dust and has the wrong brand of cheese. They squat gleefully in white pots suspended from the ceiling, and they slope gently downards towards the floor. They are trying to escape.
6. Queen Anne’s Lace
Let us hate Queen Anne’s Lace from two different angles. From above:
From below:
7. Carnations
No woman, I can assure you, has ever happily received a carnation as either a corsage or as part of a bouquet. It has confirmed for her every doubt she ever had about you. “A carnation,” she says brightly, while in her head she has already left you for another. I will not insult you by going into details. If you cannot immediately guess why carnations are unbearable, there is no hope for you.
8. Arrowhead vine
Thick and glossy and malicious; this is a parody of a plant. It looks like it’s so thick it would not catch on fire if you struck it with a match. Why is it so sticky-shiny? Why do the fronds cluster together so? Why does it collect dust? What lurks within its vegetative heart? Why do the fans look like Peter Pan hats? No, this must not be.
9. Bird of Paradise
I might object less to Birds of Paradise plants if they did not always insist in arranging their features to resemble a pelican in the act of horribly gulping some resistant, still-flopping fish. I find it deeply unsettling. Also, the tips of the flowers are always dying, like an incense stick that has just been lit. Gulp elsewhere, you garish fiend.
10. Hedges
This is, I promise you, absolutely seething with spiders. The odd, almost imperceptible rustling you hear every time you walk past one of these is the sound of ten thousand thousand baby spiders locked together in a clot uncoiling themselves and scuttling to horrible, desperate freedom. You may not be able to see them, but they are always there. Always.
11. Joshua Trees
The gnarled, arthritic hands of witches who have been captured and buried face-up in the earth (but it’s the ones who have been buried face-down that you really have to worry about).
[Images via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: hating plants, hating things, lists, nature, plants, plants that suck
is this just a thinly-veiled hate letter to southern california?
Well, I grew up in southern California, so all the plants I know are from there. I love lots of plants there too; I just don’t know what kinds of plants there are in other states.
As a resident of the polar vortex, I am extremely resentful of Southern California. I may have just been reading too much into your plant choices.
“Resident of the polar vortex” makes you sound like you live in the clouds… which would be totally pleasant and adorable if those clouds weren’t like -1342904 below zero right now.
I’m surprised you neglected to mention bougainvillea: grow anywhere, can’t be killed, leave behind a trail of withering flower corpses, and they will cut any fool who dares tangle with them because behind their freakish blossoms there be daggers.
Sunflowers are creepy because no plant that big should move. I thought that much was obvious.
You have just made me fall in love with bougainvillea. Flower corpses and hidden daggers FTW.
Also, I find them quite pretty. But yes, painful to the touch.
Daggers sheathed by pink paper lanterns.
On a similar note: rhododendrons. They are beautiful for perhaps a week in the spring, and then their flowers wither into corpses, rotting on pitiful shrubs until a gardener’s unhappy child is sent out with gloves and pruning sheers to attempt to remove them, while the sap gets in her hair, her mouth, her eyelashes.
And in the realm of plants that cannot be killed, let us not even discuss blackberries. Invoking their name may provoke an infestation.
Oh blackberries. My childhood neighbor tried to burn out his blackberry infestation. Within the blackberries was also poison oak and I had the serious misfortune of walking through that smoke when I was out taking pictures for my jr. high photography class. I didn’t know that the inside of one’s lungs could feel itchy. (all hail steroids)
Oh no! All hail steroids indeed. My family lived in a rental house for a while where the owner tried to pretend the blackberries did not exist by clear-cutting them, spreading tarps over the ground, and layering cedar bark over the top. It was my job to climb the very steep hill and try to uproot the inevitable brambles sneaking out through the cedar bark, which is how I managed to sprain my ankle by falling down the hill into a heap of nettles, covered in cedar bark splinters and with bloody hands from the thorns that had managed to penetrate my leather gloves. Multiple times. In one summer. *shudder*
I live in an apartment now. There is no yardwork in my life. It is glorious.
I own 3/4 of an acre. There is no yard work in my life…right now, while the whole damn’ pile is covered with snow. That’ll change for the worse come April 1.
(If only you could rid yourself of blackberries by saying their name 3 times, like Beetlejuice.)
Ugh that sounds awful! Enjoy your yard work respite for all it’s worth, you have certainly earned it.
People where I live now plant blackberries on purpose, it’s really weird.
You’re from the Pacific Northwest, aren’t you?
I UNDERSTAND YOUR PAIN, SISTER.
Bougainvillea has flowers that look like little paper lanterns, your arguments are invalid.
This resident of the Polar Vortex would like to nominate the hosta plant as the vile Northern cousin of the loathsome yucca. Hostas. They grow so readily and take over the front gardens of people who want plants but don’t want to take care of plants. Their bases are insipid green leaves like a yucca’s and the flower in an even more insipid purple. They are dull, like your worst nightmare of the guests you could get trapped next to at a wedding shower luncheon for a cousin you like well enough but who has a boring job in insurance and has equally boring colleagues who come to the party.
Utterly inoffensive, draining the life and joy from a walk through the neighborhood with its church basement chairs unremarkability.
Also, my adorable hound loves hostas (and garage doors that are open) and will stretch out a walk as long as possible by attempting to catalog the smell of every hosta in town. Weird animal. Weird.
I bet there’s a rat king in that hedge.
Rat kings haunt my nightmares.
Lotus pods.
NOPENOPENOPENOPE
THANK YOU. THEY ARE THE WORST.
NO
NO
NO
Sunflowers also visibly move to catch the sun on their faces throughout the day. Deeply disturbing.
I used to like sunflowers until I drove across southern Manitoba once through hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of sunflower fields. More than you can possibly imagine. Now they freak me out a bit.
Yes, creepy, like a slow motion version of the rotating head scene in The Exorcist.
How about the ginkgo tree, whose fruit smells exactly like vomit?
(or dirty underwear)
“vomit,” really? I always thought it was uncannily similar to dog shit.
True story: Once had a classmate come in and plaintively announce that he couldn’t figure out the source of a terrible smell that seemed to follow him. The class was divided between “you stepped in vomit” and “you stepped in poo.” I knew it was ginkgo, though, because (a) GINKGO and (b) I also walked from the train station and had to avoid a big pile of fruit underneath an inconveniently planted tree.
So the answer is that it smells like both!
Everything bad everywhere ever in the world is what they smell like and I reject them and their existence in this world.
Also seething with spiders? Juniper, with the added bonuses of A) reeking like the urine of a thousand roaming tomcats and B) scratching the fuck out of anyone who comes within a three foot radius.
But, gin! And Pimm’s!
I actively combat all juniper I can. The only good thing about it is gin.
drinking gin is a form of combat though
I DRINK YOUR BERRIES
Gin vampire.
During the summer, our apartment always smells vaguely of cat pee, and I couldn’t figure it out until last year when we ripped out 2/3 of the juniper in the front of the building and it was vastly lessened. I’m sorry I blamed ou, my elderly cat. It was those goddamn bushes filled with rats.
YOU SPEAK TRUTH. I was reading about poor, inoffensive yucca and bird of paradise muttering to myself “juniper, juniper, there’s GOT to be juniper.”
Juniper is just the absolute worst. ALWAYS full of spiders, no matter what time of year. I once had to stand between a wall and a juniper…hedge monstrosity to paint some trim, and I was almost in tears at the thought of all the spiders that were AT THAT MOMENT plotting to skitter their way up my legs. And it smells like poison. Like something that Snape was forced to brew by Voldemort. I refuse to even drink gin, because I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH JUNIPER.
Vodka tonic fistbump? Gin is the one booze that might be worse going down than it is coming up. Worse than Jager.
Speaking of how gross butterflies are, did anybody hear the latest Radiolab with the segment on metamorphosis? It was truly horrifying (in the most interesting possible way) and sounded like something that Mallory would be scandalized by.
13. Cedar. Specifically, the mountain cedar, aka Juniperus ashei. May it burn in hell forever.
Sounds like I have a fellow allergy sufferer?
I’m sneezing in agreement.
My eyes itch, even my ears itch!
I was really hoping to see daylilies make this list. They’re always an insipid yellow color, their bloom seldom lasts a fortnight, and their clumps of foliage always wither as soon as spring ends, leaving your garden choked up with scraggly, browning lumps for the entire summer.
But they’re delicious! And it’s so satisfying to watch people’s horrified faces as you chomp on a bouquet of them! They taste cinnamony and just a little bit spicy, if you were wondering.
… … … … I wonder if it’s possible to sugar them, like violets? There could be so many pretty cakes!
They’re mostly not yellow! The most common ones are the orange ones that aren’t tigerlilies. Look at all these, too! http://smokeysdaylilygardens.com/gallery.php (Also, yeah, delicious to add to a salad)
Why do I suddenly have the urge to watch “The Happening”?
I’m disappointed that I live too far north to have ever seen most of these. Instead, my list would be Devil’s Club for all numbers 1 to 11.
AHHHH this stuff! It’s all over one of my fave hiking places and it’s a goddamn nightmare.
Devil’s club is THE WORST.
Your revised list mostly makes sense, but it seems to me that skunk cabbage should get one spot on it. Number eight, maybe.
When we were kids, my siblings and I didn’t know what that plant was called, and one day I referred to it as “Staff of Mordor.” Everyone knew what I meant. We still call it that.
“If you cannot immediately guess why carnations are unbearable, there is no hope for you.” YES. I HAVE NO TIME FOR THOSE WHO WOULD ATTEMPT TO WOO ME WITH CARNATIONS.
What if it’s one of those where you cut the stem in half and put it into two different colors of dye for a science project? Those are kinda neat.
I REQUIRE BETTER SCIENCE TO BE WOOED BY. Also you can do that with much better flowers.
Lo, build a Van der Graaf generator for me, and tell me my hair looks better standing on end.
There is the exception: if someone spontaneously gave me carnations and food coloring so I could watch the color move into the flower, I. Would. SWOON.
Carnations are only acceptable if you have made a thousand of them into a wreath and placed it on a coffin. That is what they are for: expressing horror that the grave has claimed someone.
My husband of 43 years started our relationship with carnations. He was so disconnected from the plant world, he thought they were roses, which made me laugh. lol If I had rejected him on that basis, I would have missed out on the best husband a woman could ever want. 🙂
what about oak trees which fling acorns, also known as ankle twisters, everywhere?
And pine trees, which have instead of flowers, PINE CONES. I mean WTF. PINE CONES?
Has anyone actually been hit on the head with a falling pine cone? I don’t know if this is a rational fear or not, but they’ve got to fall some time, right, and what if it’s on my head!
Yes. Fatally. Hurrah!
One time we were hiking and a squirrel threw pine cones at us.
Ah, squirrels: the devil’s pet.
People think that because pine trees are evergreens, they never lose their needles. Those people can come over to my house in the fall and pick up all the metric tons of yellow, sticky pine needles on my lawn and driveway.
clearing out the stalks of dead sunflowers (in the winter, or just before spring planting if you procrastinate) is incredibly gross — they’re rough to the touch and stand brittle and straight like old bones.
Something is wrong with me because the phrase “old bones” seems kind of appealing somehow.
So, are we not going to mention the ghoul lurking behind the Bird of Paradise?
Shh. There is no ghoul. There is nothing there.
Just the whisper of a former bird’s soul.
A bird without legs that mates and lays eggs and raises young in the air.
Jesus God in heaven but I hate carnations. NO MORE EVER. Nothing says “Mother’s Day corsage from an 8-year-old” like a carnation. (Is this the place where I also talk about how I hate roses and lilies because I am a monster, and one time an ex-boyfriend asked me what flowers I liked and I told him how I loved tulips and daffodils, but I hated pink and purple roses and lilies and carnations. And for Valentine’s Day he got me a monster bouquet! Full of pink and purple roses and lilies and carnations. NICELY DONE.)
Uh, listening skills, people!
This is why my favorite flowers (sweet peas, night jasmine) are impossible to give in bouquet form. I like doling out challenges I guess. muaha.
I like best forget-me-nots and fairy bells, which…you cannot buy.
Sweet peas and ranunculus! Pretty, but really not good for bouquets because they can’t really stand up to the battering they get being carried around. And morning glories, which vine so really aren’t good for that. The prettiest flowers are sometimes the wimpiest.
Send your next person-who-needs-to-get-you-flowers to me. Sweet pea and jasmine are incredible in bouquets.
Your mistake there was answering more questions than had been asked! His poor addled man-brain just grabbed onto the last thing you said. Best to make small notecards with relevant information for items like this…
I love red roses, even though they are the most stereotypical thing. Next boyfriend better get me some.
The Tall Man and I have totally opposite taste in flowers, in that he thinks carnations are FINE, and I think they are the DEVIL, and we compromise in that I buy all the flowers and he pretends not to see them.
Is that better or worse than my ex who said he would plant me flowers in the summer because he didn’t believe in the clichee of buying them? (Note: the flower planting never happened.) And the one time he did bring me flowers, he’d gotten them from a dumpster behind a trader joe’s. (They had been pitched because they were wilting.)
When he asked “what do you want for valentines/birthday/christmas day?” and I said “I really love flowers” he just kept asking what I wanted for valentine’s/birthday/christmas day…
As a result, I now hold the policy that if I want flowers, I will buy flowers.
So I guess ex boyfriend’s are maybe the worst plants?
I nominate Bradford Pears. They are planted ALL OVER THE PLACE around here but their root systems are shallow as shit so they topple really easily, their blooms smell like rotting shrimp shells (to me; I’ve also heard them called ‘semen trees’), and to make them that pretty decorative shape everyone wants them in you have to lop all the branches off every year to get them to grow back again the right way so for a good chunk of every year people have these weird bradford trunks with what looks like horrid Sims 3 hair standing in their yards, being hideous and useless.
Yes, purge them all with fire! They’re a major element of landscaping at the college campuses where I did my degrees and where I’m currently employed. Semen trees, indeed, they sap my powers of misandry and I’m forced to go about campus with a handkerchief across my face like a delicate lady.
They are terrible trees. Pretty, but useless.
But now this reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask someone – does semen actually have a smell? Because it doesn’t to me. People get all excited saying Bradford pears smell like semen, but how can it smell like something that doesn’t have a smell? Am I just missing the semen smell receptor?
THE WOOOOOOOOORST. For some unfathomable reason these were planted outside the doors to my high school’s cafeteria, so our plans to eat lunch outside on the rare spring warm days were always thwarted by the “fish trees,” as we called them.
THEY ARE TERRIBLE AND MUST BE DESTROYED. Anytime we have a storm here, half the Bradford Pears snap in half right down the middle and fall all over the road. KILL THEM WITH FIRE.
THANK YOU BIRDS OF PARADISE ARE TERRIFYING.
My aloe vera plant is my friend and you are a mean lady, Mallory
Here, here! I have an aloe plant that, I swear, is 20 years old. A teacher gave me a cutting in high school and it’s the only plant I’ve ever owned that I haven’t managed to kill.
Also, who else had a high school that did carnations every Valentine’s Day where you would pay a dollar for a carnation and send it to someone? My friends and I would all send each other carnations so that nobody looked unloved, but I still remember the horror one day of receiving one from an actual secret admirer who then revealed himself to me by leaving a valentine in my locker and he was definitely that weird kid that always hung around trying to be “the nicest friend” and always offering back rubs and to buy me all the things. Nice Guy Carnation. The worst.
My high school did this and not once in four years did I ever receive one. My friends and I pretended we were not interested? I TOTALLY WANTED ONE THOUGH. (I also secretly wanted someone to ask me to prom by decorating my locker or my car, and no one ever did THAT either, though in my senior year my friends decorated my locker for my birthday and stuffed it full of candy and it was possibly even better.)
Oh my god, my high school did this for National Suicide Week– yellow carnations. Mostly popular people sent them to their friends in an completely unsuicide-related fashion, but one year I got one. With a note telling me, in round, girlish handwriting, “You’re Special!” I took this apart and arrived at the conclusion that the group of students running this farce had decided, based on my poor football game attendance, that I was suicidal.
I don’t have low self esteem. I have low esteem for everyone else!
Yes. Most awkward time of the year!
YEP. Just like the candy canes in Mean Girls. “And none for Gretchen Wieners bye!”
We also did this in middle school (even worse idea!) and I sent a carnation every year to the boy I had a Life-Threatening Unrequited Crush on. I may have sent them anonymously but I do believe he knew (and had no interest whatsoever, perhaps due to my exceptionally large and square gold-rim glasses, ferocious eyebrows, and odd scrunchie collection? I would have been the cutest baby hipster, if anyone had appreciated that aesthetic in 1994) Also it was a weird separate-but-affiliated girls’-school/boys’-school setup so we did not actually interact.
20 years later, I looked him up in an idle moment of wondering whatever became of him, and found his LinkedIn profile, and he works in a senior position at LinkedIn so now he DEFINITELY knows I’m a creeper.
Can we make “Carnations of OKCupid” be a new thing? Please?
I would also like to nominate pampas grass. First, it looks cool, but if you touch it, it’s actually some hellplant of paper cuts. Second, it immediately grows too large to divide or dig up or destroy, requiring chains, fire, a priest, and a large truck to remove.
It is also full of spiders. Spiders and rats.
But if you break off a feathery stem you can march around with it waving like a banner and have minions fan you with it.
Aahh, the invasive plant seeds! Spread everywhere! You are a great and terrible queen. I will follow you to protect my own.
You are correct about the sunflowers and the carnations, of course.
The Joshua Trees, though. They will not forgive you for this insult.
It’s cool, global warming is going to take them out in our lifetime.
Well, out of Joshua Tree National Park. Some of them will take to the hills and lurk indefinitely.
Joshua Trees are the beautiful dancing fools of the desert. Insults mean nothing to them, they have no pride to be threatened.
SCOTCH BROOM. CEDAR TREES. RAGWEED. They have made me suffer and one day I will make them suffer even greater pain. BURN IT ALL.
This is one of those things where revenge makes things worse for the revenger. I thought I was allergic to scotch broom and ragweed, and then I spent a summer doing invasive weeds eradication and mainlining Benadryl, and now my allergies are SO MUCH WORSE. Also I am allergic to touching knapweed now.
Herbicide. Herbicide and minions. That’s my new plan.
I am glad that I can learn from your misadventure!
Also I think Scotch Broom responds well to fires. Lots of tough little seeds down in the soil, waiting for the world to be cleansed by flame. Waiting to corrupt it again.
I was hoping that succulents would be spared from this list as they make perfect house plants for the busy and neglectful. Stinging nettles can actually sting you pretty bad and poison oak will poison your skin and cause a bad lingering rash. Or are all the “poison” plants obvious low hanging fruit?
Oh no, those plants are awesome. They hide nothing of their true nature.
Succulents seem nice, but the more you learn about them the more hateful they are.
Give me a sample of the worst offenses of succulents, please. I must be ignorant to, or hypnotized by, their evil.
I love succulents. They’re meat plants. Just palpate one and you’ll see.
[cackles]
The flesh is from botanists foolish enough to study them!
1.) The polysaccharides that make them succulent have many properties in common with DNA, so when I try to extract DNA, I also get huge amounts of polysaccharides.
2.) Most plants die when you pick them and squash them in blotter paper. Not succulents. Succulents sit there, digesting sugars and cannibalizing tissues until I open up the plant press and there they are, sticks and floating withered leaves. Into the press goes a beautiful plant with identifiable traits, out comes a stick.
3.) But they still manage to ruin the blotter paper while drying. Blotter paper is expensive.
4.) If you’re trying to separate species, you’ll note that every single cliff has a slightly different version of the species. Because they are trying to thwart me.
5.) If you are a plant that grows on cliffs, you should have the decency to have all the traits required for ID at the same time. Cliffs are tough. Why do I need have to have both flowers and bracts for ID, and then flowers and bracts aren’t on the plant at the same time?
Thanks, that’s the stuff I wanted to know, still glad to have such freaks in my home. They’re probably extraterrestrial plants (I’ve been watching too much X-files while feverish).
I was sort of put off by succulents, but then I remember snapping a leaf off an aloe plant when I was really sunburned and rubbing its ooze on my skin and then thanking the plant gods for this generous plant.
I am allergic to aloe gel, but only on damaged skin.
Finding that out was a delightful process.
Stinging nettles make a really good iron-rich tea that is good for ladies a certain time of the month. And nettles are good in soup, too. (The stinging factor disappears when cooked). Hold off the nettles, they are good to have around after all!
As a Kansan, I feel obligated to stick up for sunflowers. But after “the seeds are really good covered in chocolate,” I’ve nothing more to say.
Birds really like them! The tubers contain a very short carbohydrate that stabilizes blood sugar in everyone except Northern Europeans, who instead get terrible gas!
Ooh, that is a Fun Sunflower Fact!
I’ll sign up to write the counterintuitive Slate piece on why carnations are the best and only flower. I mean, they’re cheap, so at least you didn’t spend a lot of money on the flowers that will sit on my table for a week and slowly grow mold and not fit into the trashcan and become a terrible, terrible burden.
Have you considered statice? Instead of festering-milk flowers?
They last a really long time, too! My partner will buy a super cheap bunch of them from Trader Joes and put them in a vase, and they’ll stay nice for almost two weeks if you put in fresh water!
Those look very pretty, but I feel like you all are underestimating my laziness when it comes to fresh flowers.
My mother said carnations were bad luck and for funerals. She KNEW
Your mother is wise.
Something for the carnation H8Rs to look forward to: one of these days you guys will encounter real-deal carnations and it will knock your socks off and it will be like this new flower was just invented for you to enjoy. So go ahead and bask in your peonies, roses, hycainths, orchids (I love all of them), but genuine carnations are waiting for you. Mmmmmm….
Seriously, all plants are saints. You know what I hate? Polar bears (so mean!) and hyenas (the meanest!!)
I too would be mean if I gave birth through my enlarged clitoris.
Whaaaat? This factoid appears to be absent from the polar bears wikipedia page. More info please?!
Oh wait I just reread your comment and I realized you meant hyenas. I am now very informed about the hyena breeding mechanisms and it is horrifying. Here’s the wiki if anyone else is curious.
It is horrifying! Also your name is excellent and the book it comes from is excellent!
I’m sorry I have nothing about the clitoris to contribute, just want to back you up on REAL scented carnations. If you ever find one you will know it. It will be smaller, wilt more quickly, and generally not be super impressive visually, but they have the most luscious scent. Lucifer wears only crushed real carnations as his cologne. It is unearthly, cannot be captured by any perfumier (if someone tells you a perfume smells of carnations they are lying), spicy and sweet and ephemeral beautiful, and utterly, utterly unlike the carnations you can buy. This comment is 5 days late but I feel very strongly about this flower. If anyone ever gave me a real carnation I’m pretty sure I’d do any manner of criminal things for them.
Also, ALL forms of nettle. Ouch.
Nettle pasta though. And the zesty, almost vinegary sting! It’s refreshing! And you can ask people to ID it over and over again!
Thistles and artichokes, though! Or are they not nettles? Thistles are so pretty and artichokes are tasty.
I thought thistles were different! They don’t sting apparently. And I had no idea that artichokes were thistle. They are quite tasty.
so are nettles! They make a great tea and also good soup.
How dare you grow as tall as me. Never change, Mallory.
I can confirm the part about the spiders.
I expected my magical dryad soul to be more offended by this, but I can’t argue with most of it except Queen Anne’s Lace. What did Queen Anne ever do to you?
Joshua Trees are definitely witches. I agree on that.
Plus, reportedly, Queen Anne’s Lace can be used as contraception! (citation: http://www.sisterzeus.com/qaluse.htm)
Queen Anne’s Lace have tiny pinpricks of blood at their centers. They are occult weeds.
Clearly you live somewhere with no poison ivy (insidious), prickly nightshade (horrific), or fruitless mulberry (it leaves piles of its tree-sperm EVERYWHERE).
I don’t have anything to add re: plants, but I want to second Mallory’s opinion of butterflies. They are horrid, and basically moths, people. Plus, they fly in a creepy, herky-jerky manner.
thirded! in my experience, this opinion is met with much opposition (“but they’re so pretty!”), so I have been living my life feeling like a lone anti-butterfly crusader. thankfully I now know that not all of us are fooled by those bright-ass patterns.
I was indeed cruelly mocked for my distaste-bordering-on-fear of the butterflies landing on me at the butterfly room at the Museum of Science in Boston.
Steering a butterfly is hard. Cut them some slack.
They do enable plant sex, and for that we cannot forgive them.
clot of baby spiders why
I like sunflowers fine, but I’ll give Mallory some more ammunition against them: they have a weird, high, acrid smell, akin to the sharp smell of tomato plants but ranker, and the stems leak a viscous sap that is hard to wash off. Ew.
I’d think that looking like the severed head of a blond man would be a selling point of the sunflower.
And for nominations of worst plants, eucalyptus trees and sagebrush. A eucalyptus tried to kill my mom in the El Nino storms of the mid 90’s, continually shed leaves everywhere, launch hard seed pods on your head when they know you’re in a good trajectory, and are exceedingly flammable. Sagebrush is ugly, only home to bugs, scorpions, diseased rabbits, and also with the flaming. Plus, I’m very allergic to both.
100% with you on the Eucalyptus trees, amazingly flammable and have a nasty habit of dropping huge freaking branches on you after hot weather, with no warning whatsoever. The Worst.
Eucalyptus are the reason Oakland burned in the early 90’s. They are also the staple food of koalas. I am a house divided.
California birds eat the nectar, and then their little nostrils get plugged and they suffer.
Eucalyptus DOES kill all the plants on the ground though, so that’s something in its favor.
you have seen them in the kind of home that is coated in dust and has the wrong brand of cheese.
AHAHAHAHA you have described my home perfectly, though you left out the clusters and stacks of pottery on the dust-coated shelves, which it seems to me are also always present in succulent-houses.
I study succulents, and the stacks of pottery keep showing up. It’s as if they apparate. I’m running out of space in the fridge with all of the terrible cheeses. Raspberry-chipotle chedder? How did this get here?
That cholla (also sadistically called the teddy bear cactus) is the absolute worst plant. There was one in the front yard of my house in Tucson. While it was useful for keeping strangers off my porch, just brushing up against it would mean tens of painful little spines broken off into my flesh (through jeans!). I just cringed involuntarily looking at that picture.
However, my rescue dog, who is a true product of the desert, would chase balls and lizards into that cholla, and come right back out covered in spines and acting like he didn’t even notice them. He would only act up when I tried to remove them from his muzzle and ears with tweezers (they get infected otherwise).
I spent 2 summers working for a landscaper who had a degree in horticulture. She hated yucca plants and referred to them as phallic monstrosities, thrusting toward heaven.
Ginkgo. The boy trees drop pustules that smell like jizz. Fuck ginkgo.
Come to me all plants (except you, carnations) and I will fold you to my bosom and we shall all be beloved in our weirdness from henceforth.
Seriously, I had no idea how much affection I had for plants, especially these plants, until this! I love them! Hate away, Mallory, but I love them, each of them, for being so weird, and WAY more sentient than you know.
But not you, carnations. I had an ex who would do stupid things and then compound the horror by bringing me corner store dyed carnations and it got so he would show up with them and I would KNOW there was some betrayal imminent.
I felt strangely defensive in ways that I usually never do!
But I agree: carnations are the worst.
YES, plants, I love you so! Even the weird ones!
What’s that plant that smells like jizz? Do you guys know what I mean? I live in the Pacific Northwest, and there is most certainly that plant here. I don’t want to search for it while I’m at work though…
how many of you are out there smelling jizz, darlings? I wouldn’t have the faintest clue what what it smells like, but there are so many jizz smell comments today!
your Internet mother is worried about you.
I missed the other comment! This is like a Craigslist missed connection
No, there is definitely a plant that smells like it, we have it in Australia too! One time, my friends and I went on a holiday, and had to walk past several of those trees to get from our accomodation into the town, and we’d have to all hold our noses as we went past, it smelled ridiculously strong, ugh
Ah, you mean either the linden tree or the Bradford pear.
LINDEN TREE
I’m in TX, but many people I know refer to ligustrum as jizzy-smelling. I’m really allergic to it, and it bongs on a hated plants list.
I was on board until #6, and then back on board again afterward, but dammit, Mallory, Queen Anne’s lace is *delicate* and *magical*.
Mitchell and Webb’s linden tree sketch! All you need to know.
Orchids of all varieties are perfect, even (especially) the ones that smell like rotting corpses.
Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men; their perfume has the sickly sweetness of corruption.
Thank you.
I am a person who must always live in homes that are filled with houseplants. I can confirm that I am not to be trusted. Those who encounter me when the moon is waxing should sprinkle black pepper in my wake to hurry my footsteps away from them.
High five! (My houseplant blog.)
Ha, I was waiting for you to turn up! 😀
May we expect a vigorous riposte one of these days???
I’m kind of bummed out that Mallory wrote this article before I could. (The idea actually had occurred to me, but I am lazy.)
MY CHEESE BRANDS ARE FINE AND I DUSTED THOROUGHLY THIS WEEKEND
I’m gonna bring the eldritch straight to the front of my face when I install my new hanging garden this week. Give me all the plants!
Let us not forget Camas. One is blue and the other is white, one will kill you and the other is fine to eat, I cannot for the life (or death) of me remember which is which.
Blue is fine, white’ll kill you. However, they should be harvested in the fall, long after the blooms have dropped off.
You can tell me this all day but I promise when I am back home, lost in the woods and starving to death, I will not remember. Since I was a kid I cannot keep them straight.
Fair enough. I grew up calling them Blue Camas and Death Camas, which made it pretty clear.
The criticism of the yucca reminds me of the Fug Girls taking down an ill-designed, ill-made dress.
(That’s a good thing.)
Can’t talk about plants that hide armies of spiders and bugs and rodents without pachysandra. Ground covers in general, but pachysandra sounds like a particularly malevolent character in a Greek play.
Also in the plants that hide armies of bugs: fucking peonies. ANT MAGNETS.
I declare the Honey Locust as the Devil’s own tree.
Don’t believe me? Look up the this terrifying thorny visage! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_locust
Wikipedia notes that thorns from the Honey Locust would be used as nails sometimes, they’re that hard. And long.
…I had to cut them down as part of conservation projects. I’ll never forget the abject hate I had for those trees. But at least I could battle them with chainsaws.
I plant mandrake and belladonna. I am a very gracious host. Please come to my home.
I’m pretty OK with plants and I hate to be a cliche, but I mean my mother-in-law has a WHOLE ROOM dedicated to houseplants so you may be on to something here.
At least dried cholla makes a neat trophy corpse, during one’s Southwestern goth phase.
i cant believe no ones mentioned roses and the way they demand your attention if you stray too close to their clutching limbs.i for one dont want any relationship with something so needy.
I HATE sunflowers. I hate the pattern of the seeds in the middle and I hate that when there are lots of them, they look like a troop of wilting soldiers. Last summer I stayed in a cottage in the countryside near Toulouse for a week and the cottage was surrounded by all four sides for miles and miles and miles with fields of sunflowers. There was one near the cottage that was slightly in front of the others and taller, and had drooped in the sun and was leaning forward on a lamppost and I swear it was just waiting to build up the energy to lead them all in battle. To kill us all, of course.
Mallory, how did you read my dream last night of being in a field of dandelion seeds (is that what those white fuzzy things are called?) and basically getting stalked by them? Screw plants.
Secondly, can you do the same post with birds next time? Can we discuss the terrifying nature of pigeons?
That entire sunflower description just makes me love them more, though.
True story: my grandmother (known for her occasionally questionable taste) loves carnations and growing up I thought they were just, like, the only flower people had in their houses? Like, the only bouquet available? One day I think someone went on a huge rant about how carnations are the worst, and I was just SHOCKED, but now I kind of agree. They are not the best, but they make me think fondly of my grandmother, so there’s that.
12. Kudzu. It creeps along the earth and can swallow cars whole almost overnight. It is coming for us.
Also, it stinks. Cut a piece of kudzu and an acrid stench will linger for days, if not weeks.
I once read a (sort of terrible, if memory serves) dystopian novel in which a band of characters tries to get from the eastern US seaboard to what used to be Georgia, only to be thwarted by a wall of kudzu that stretched from the Gulf Coast to the Ozarks.
Was this the same book where someone killed a guy and then left the body in the kudzu?
Wait, I think that was a nightmare I had…..
I think it was called The O-Zone. Now there’s a novel name with many terrible layers.
I know that I am so late on this but (yes Kudzu is the worst)
No one says Crab Apple trees? They drop these gross smelling red sticky things EVERYWHERE, and when you’re a kid all the other kids pick them up and throw them at people.
I am late to this article but also SO HEARTBROKEN about Sunflowers. While I feel your critique of them is valid for the reasons you listed, they are also the LAST AND ONLY HOPE of girls who are very butch-y femmes but still like to receive flowers occasionally, because sunflowers are sort of meaty and sunny and pleasant.
Have you considered gerbera daisies? They have kind of a similar look but are rather less horrifying.
NO.
Gebera daisies are the erectile dysfunction of the floral world, and are usually loved by the types of women who are just “out having fun with the girls!”
…
I may also be bitter because the smarmy little arseholes need to be wired individually in arrangements in order to not droop. They’re hell for florists.
They can also, in a pinch, be used as a blunt instrument.
ALSTROEMERIA. Alstroemeria is shit, right up there with carnations. I have no need of a man who would woo me with alstroemeria. By all means, bring me irises and gladiolas. Bring me roses in an unconventional color or tulips. Bring me calla lilies or begonias. But don’t ever send me the pale, sickly, striped hideousness of alstroemeria, with its stamens sticking out like antennas of the very worst kinds of insects. Alstroemeria, with its name that sounds like a 17th century plague and its uneven, lopsided petals. Even alstroemeria is disappointed in itself.
Alstroemeria are a sack of turkey assholes.
I made the mistake of using them for boutonnieres once.
They were the saddest, pulpiest mess by the next morning.
I’m quite at a loss as to why Queen Anne’s Lace deserves such ire, especially given its history as an historic contraceptive.
They are motherfucking bastards and should die a thousand deaths.
I fell headlong into a patch when I was five, in the Mojave Desert.
Clearly, my psyche has not recovered.
I AM TOTALLY FROM THE NORTHWEST. Anti- blackberry solidarity! Now I live on the East Coast, where no one believes my gardening war stories and think that blackberries are a delightful fruit that should be encouraged. They are very
A trail I once went on while mountain biking was lined with pampas grass. Going up wasn't that big of a deal, but going down was like being lashed with a sandpaper whip for a quarter mile.
Not a big fan of cactus. When I was a child I fell backwards into a large bed of densely-packed cactus plants – the ones that look like cushions but have inch long spikes all over them. Thanks for breaking my fall, but not for the most unpleasant experience of my life and the week spent lying on my stomach afterwards.
Yes! I saw mangrove trees (which are common as mud around here) listed as exotic and rare, and figured "oh well this must be a list of REALLY common plants," only to find desert things I've never even HEARD of, lol.