Learning about plants has made my biopunk novel much more complicated like damn now I have to think about all the species and stuff
Generically vague settings are ruined for me forever. do y'all have any idea how specific the plant life in an area gets???
*Stares at the plants in novel set in fictional place with suspicion and criticism*
actually, i wanna talk about nature tropes in fantasy/otherwise “speculative” media because fiction has these stock tropes about nature that are so universal throughout everything from books to video games, and it turns out that they have nothing to do with reality
For starters, did y'all know that
(with the exception of one species) cacti are ONLY native to the Americas, and deserts on all other continents have NO CACTI?
Does that mean that Africa, in similar situations, mostly has spiky shrubs (without those water-consuming green things called leaves) and yams-like storage roots?
Or are there further concepts?
What does Australia do?
I know about succulents, and that they’re also fairly common in the Alps (I don’t know if they’re native there, but the local name, “Hauswurz” - literally “house root” or “home root” - indicates as much).
Which aren’t deserts in the narrower sense, but also not exactly known for rich flora, due to the altitude, low amount of topsoil, and cold.
Have you reached a level that permits you to see
patterns that shape plant life in an area? It sounds a bit like you’re in an area of frequent enlightenment…
Well the thing about plants is that they are
much, MUCH weirder than animals are about radically altering and reshuffling their basic body forms and plans over the course of evolution, even within the same genus.
If you saw this plant, what would you assume its closest relatives are?
If you answered “violets,” good job! This is
Viola atropurpurea, from the same genus as your common backyard violets.
This is weird. Can we talk about how weird this is? This is like if tigers and lions shared the genus
Panthera with some kind of tiny aquatic salamander-like thing.
Cacti are a specific plant family. Succulent plants have convergently evolved approximately a billion times and come from (almost) every corner of the plant family tree. The universality of cacti as the iconic Desert Plant has much to do with the average person not knowing the great variety of desert adapted plants, and mentally categorizing unrelated succulent plants as cacti because “cactus” is the closest word they have.
Desert plants are weird y'all. A ton of them look like weird mushroom- or barrel-like bulges and tubes. Like, just look at this thing.
This is called “Sand Food” and it’s edible
This is Yareta and there are no photos of it that are like “Yeah that is a normal, real thing.” (It’s not moss! It’s a flowering plant!)
