How can a Vegetable be a Monster? | Stella Sandford

The study of ‘monsters’ is an important part of the history of biology. But unlike their counterparts in zoology, botanists struggled to distinguish between normal variation and abnormal monstrosity in plant life, with many arguing that the distinction was merely arbitrary.
In this lecture we will consider why it is so difficult to identify a plant monster, focusing particularly on Maxwell T. Masters’s (FLS) Vegetable Teratology (1869), and we will see how botanical teratology helps us to understand some of the common themes in the literary and filmic genres of ‘plant horror’. With reference to classics such as John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids and Christian Nyby’s film The Thing from Another World (both 1951) we will examine what happens when the traditional ‘monster’ of the classics of the horror genre is replaced by a vegetable threat and ask: do plants in themselves somehow represent a kind of threat, and if so, how? What, if anything, is ‘horrific’ about plants in plant horror?
Stella Sandford is Professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London. Her most recent book is Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants (Bloomsbury, 2022); her current research focusses critically on conceptions of plant ‘self’ and plant ‘agency’.
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