The Roots behind why magical plants in Harry Potter are so fascinatingly dangerous.
By Joseph Hayes
Dangerous plants are omnipresent in Harry Potter but their history stems back much further than that.
The ‘Venomous Tentacula’, ‘Devil’s Snare’ and perhaps most famously of all the ‘Whomping Willow’. These are just to name a few of the many magical plants in Harry Potter.
Plants often play a key role in the movies. With ‘Devil’s Snare’ nearly asphyxiating Harry, Hermione and Ron in the Philosopher’s Stone while the ‘Whomping Willow’ features as a key plot device in both the Chamber of Secrets and particularly the Prisoner of Azkaban films.
Yet the wider cultural history behind these plants stretches back longer into the 19th century. This was a period of fascination with exploration and plants. Charles Darwin himself carried out experiments on carnivorous plants with human hair that would have made Professor Sprout proud.
Reports from explorers started to tell tale of plants that devoured not only insects but also horrifically people.
The Ya-te-veo tree targeted among other creatures, humans which it crushed with its tendrils “until every drop of blood is squeezed out of it and becomes absorbed by the gore-loving plant”. As this illustration shows it was a brutal death for the victim.
Killer Plants
These killer plants looked placid until they come into contact with their prey. Which they lured with their pleasant nectar. Once this occurred though it was all over. The plant would grip the unsuspecting human “ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey”. The victim was quickly crushed to death.
Now one may think how is this relevant to Harry Potter? The answer is that the novels and film series continue on a tradition of terrible plants that are fascinating in their horror. As Chase et al highlight in Murderous plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and modern insights into vegetable carnivory “a carnivorous plant, Tentacula, is also featured in the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 1998), building upon the romantic but horrific idea of plants devouring people”.
There was logic however in this terror. Many Victorians thought that if there were plant variants such as The Sundew which consumed insects why shouldn’t plants in exotic lands do the same to people? This same rationality exists in the Harry Potter series. Some magical plants featured in Harry Potter are larger or more dangerous variants of those which reside in the Muggle domain such as The ‘Chinese Chomping Cabbage’ or the ‘Fanged Geranium’.
How plants interact within Harry Potter
The plants in this sense almost act as a barometer of the magic within Harry Potter. Just as director Chris Columbus contrasted the “bleak and dreary” nature of the Muggle world with that of the Wizard world “steeped in color, mood, and detail”. So does the magical flora such as the ‘Whomping Willow’ that literally bashes its way into The Chamber of Secrets show how in the Wizarding world things are both different but familiar from that of its Muggle counterpart?
As Dr Michael F Fay highlights “Carnivorous plants appeal to the ghoulish side of our nature. And there are persistent rumors of plants that consume mammals. The Victorians were renowned for their interest in Gothic stories. But even now, carnivorous plants play on our interest in the macabre”.
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“As they are studied in more detail, more and more weird details about their biology are discovered – they don’t behave like “normal” plants. And it is not surprising that man-eating plants are a recurring feature in fiction even today. Will a man-eating plant ever be found? Almost certainly not, but be prepared for more weird facts about these carnivores of the plant kingdom to emerge”.