Stranger Than Lilies: A Cryptobotanical Survey of Freakish Flora, Peculiar Plants, and Historical Herbals (Part II)

Welcome back, dear reader, to the other half of the Freakish Flora blog post, where a librarian-turned-amateur-cryptobotanist delves into the strange plants lurking within the Lilly Library’s Collection. While the first half of Freakish Flora (Stranger Than Lilies: A Cryptobotanical Survey of Freakish Flora, Peculiar Plants, and Historical Herbals (Part I) | IU Libraries Blogs (indiana.edu) covered the popular crowd of abnormal plants, this blog will cover some more obscure (well, more obscure) organisms. By the end of this excursion, you will be a certified expert, armed with the know-how of everything from miraculous moss that grows on the dead, trees that spontaneously create water, orchids that feed on humans and look like them, and other mysterious members of the plant kingdom.

Woodcut relief of the man orchid (Orchis anthropophora) from Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus.

The Rain Tree is a cryptid tree native to the island of El Hierro, one of the smallest islands of the Canary Islands archipelago. The Bimbache, the native people of El Hierro before the Spanish conquest, called the tree Garse or Garoé (meaning “sacred” or “holy tree”) (Gioda 112). Joseph Taylor in The Wonders of Trees, Plants, and Shrubs reports that the tree grows on top of a rock at Tigulatre, a rocky cliff or valley near the ocean. The leaves of the tree are said to continuously generate water, enough so to hydrate everything living on the island by condensing ocean mist that settles upon its leaves. This miraculous ability is attributed to be nature’s counterbalance for El Hierro’s frequent and severe droughts. Taylor also explains that the species of the Rain Tree is a mystery, and only knows it is called Til. 

The man orchid (Orchis anthropophora), naked man orchid (Orchis italica), and the military orchid (Orchis militaris) are all strange but real-life plants that bloom little-human-like flowers. However, in many botanicals, these plants are depicted with tiny faces and other features, as seen in the illustrations below lifted from Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus and John Parkinson’s Theatrum botanicum.

Given the petals’ explicit semblance to humans (with pronounced male sexual organs), it is not surprising that in folk belief, these orchids are attributed with procreative properties. In Israel, it was believed that consuming the orchid’s tubers would cure impotence, and in Turkey, the flower was used as an aphrodisiac. In Italy, the naked man orchid (also called the Italian orchid) was credited with increasing virility in men. Orchids bearing sapient mini-human blossoms are not found in your average greenhouse– sadly– thus these curious specimens of orchis would fit right in in our aberrant greenhouse.

Another orchid of note in Lilly’s collection appears in the first edition of H. G. Wells’ The Country of the Blind: and Other Stories, being the titular strange orchid of the short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.” In this tale, orchid-enthusiast Mr. Winter-Wedderburn acquires a mysterious orchid of an unidentified species. The captivating orchid excretes an overwhelming sweet perfume, and has white flowers streaked with golden orange and blueish purple (Wells 57-58). The text hints that death follows the orchid, and soon we see why–after blooming, the orchid’s sweet scent renders Wedderburn unconscious and its tentacle-like roots attach and entangle him before siphoning away his blood. Luckily, our unfortunate gardener has a proactive cousin who finds him before he dies of exsanguination, and the orchid is left to die in the cold winter air outside Wedderburn’s greenhouse. And you thought Venus flytraps were hardcore.

Muscus ex Craneo Humano is a marvelously morbid moss that grows not upon fallen logs or rocks, but on human skulls. In John Gerard’s The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, the moss is described as “This kind of moss is found upon the skull or bare scalps of men and women, lying long in charnel houses, and other places where the bones of men are kept together: it groweth very thick, white, like the short moss upon the trunks of old oaks” (1373-1374). Curiously, a plant so intrinsically linked with death is attributed with medicinal properties– able to cure whooping cough in children if ground into a powder and mixed into sweet wine, and once thought to be the “singular remedy” against the falling evil– an old term for epilepsy.

According to Christopher Duffin, belief was held that the vital force or life essence of those that died young or violently would concentrate into the skull, giving rise to the white moss. However, the most interesting therapeutic powers of the moss came into play when it was made into a special, Paracelsian ointment known as the “weapon salve.” The salve, whether through macrocosmic forces or sympathetic magic, could heal someone if applied not to their wound, but to the weapon that afflicted it (Duffin 79). Through this strange method, an injured person could even be healed remotely from a great distance, as long as the specific weapon that harmed them could be located and coated with the salve. The real-world equivalent of Muscus ex Craneo Humano is probably your friendly neighborhood usnea– known commonly as beard lichen– which can grow on dirt, trees, stone, and yes, even bones. 

The last specimen of our cryptobotanical journey is also the most elusive– the browsing toadstool. A distant cousin of the dancing mushroom (Grifola frondosa), the browsing toadstool springs up from texts and illustrations made with lampblack, iron-gall, or oak-gall ink. Similarly to the man orchid, the browsing toadstool possesses a small set of eyes, and a level of sentience. According to sources, they can hop at incredibly fast speeds and speak– though they choose to do so only in riddles. In 1971, the librarians of the Lilly Library were able to capture of a photo of a browsing mushroom before it vanished into the stacks. No more sightings have been reported since.