Alluring Flowers

All across the meadows, many poppies blossomed, and that were so hypnotic and brilliant in color they nearly dazzled Dorothy's eyes. "Aren't they beautiful?" the girl asked her companions, as she breathed in the spicy scent of the big, bright flowers.

— The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Flowers are often seen as beautiful and attractive things, and have a lot of cultural baggage in this regard. This is typically borne from a simple sense of aesthetic appreciation, but in certain cases, this will be described in terms of a literally supernatural allure. Fictional flowers, rather than simply looking and smelling nice, are the sirens of the vegetable kingdom, exerting powerful and potentially dangerous mental influences on other beings.

Usually, this manifests through flowers being given entrancing or hypnotic scents. These plants may possess outright narcotic, intoxicating, or otherwise drug-like effects, which will be experienced by those who consume their flowers or nectar or even simply smell them. Simply catching a whiff of their scent may be enough to put the unwary in a catatonic state or to set them on a dazed, single-minded search for the source of the smell.

These flowers are very often linked to sexuality in some manner, something ultimately derived from how real flowers mimic insects in order to get them to "mate" with them to spread their pollen. In some cases, the plants, especially if animate or humanoid, will exert an almost sexual attraction on humanoid or otherwise animal targets. In others, they may instead serve as aphrodisiacs when consumed or just be associated with beauty and sexuality in a more abstract manner.

These flowers often turn out to be outright carnivorous. In these cases, their attempts to attract animal life don't occur to favor pollination, but serve as a way to lure prey and render it dazed and insensate for the plant's consumption. Here, the flowers may end up being conflated with the elaborate traps of real carnivorous plants.

Finally, these plants are almost always exotic things; it's quite rare for a common garden posy to possess such supernatural allure. They will typically be found in distant and wild locations, usually fertile, tropical, and trackless; equatorial jungles and swamps are common locations for these things, as are more openly alien settings. Physically, these plants also tend to take after tropical flowers in appearance, with bright colors, large blooms, and waxy petals. Tropical orchids are a common base model and often serve directly in this capacity, a trend that was particularly common in literature written during and after the orchid manias of the 1800s.

Subtrope of Fantastic Flora and Luring in Prey. See also Foul Flower. Compare and contrast Flowers of Romance.

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Examples

Comic Books

• Batman: Pamela Isley, as part of her repertoire of Green Thumb powers, can use Pheromones to get men to do her bidding. Depending on the Writer, it can work on women as well, especially lesbian or bisexual ones. Since she's a scientist, however, she's able to upgrade her abilities or develop new pheromones that compel a person regardless of sexual orientation or target. For instance, one concoction causes two men (who were previously shown to be attracted to women) to start uncontrollably making out with each other.
• Judge Dredd: The Father Earth arc comes to an abrupt end when the invaders break the containment cages of hypnotic, carnivorous alien plants. Father Earth believes it to be his god and willingly lets himself be taken up and eaten by the plant.

Fan Works

• The Flight of the Alicorn: The honeytrap tree that grows in the jungles of the Impassable Lands emits an attractive-smelling pollen and surrounds itself with a deep pool of its sweet nectar, tempting animals to come and drink. The nectar itself only makes creatures drowsy and sleepy, but any disturbance of the pool will also draw out the tree's flesh-eating symbionts to come out and feed.

Literature

• "An Orchid Of Asia": A "Venezuelan death orchid" is hybridized into a new variety with a scent that is both sensual and will-numbing. Under its effects, the narrator perceives a monstrous female presence watching him, as if from across aeons of time.
• Aralorn: The coralis tree attracts butterflies with its blossoms, then closes the petals above them and digests them.
• "The Flowering Of The Strange Orchid", by H. G. Wells, describes a reclusive orchid collector who acquires an exotic orchid bulb that grows into an orchid of a species unknown to science. When it eventually blooms, the flower produces a powerful sweet odor that overpowers every other scent in the greenhouse. The smell entices the grower to investigate the plant, which has produced an immense and beautiful flower, but up close the scent overpowers him and causes him to faint; his maid eventually finds him passed out in his greenhouse, the orchid's roots already coiled around his neck and sucking out his blood.
• InCryptid: Swamp bromeliads are giant flowers that can eat mammals as large as a deer, and sometimes prey on humans. Their flowers emit an alluring scent, and the pollen has a narcotic effect that quickly incapacitates the prey.
• The Odyssey: Shown in the page picture are the Lotus-Eaters and their flowers. The flowers of the lotus bring people who eat them into a state of vegetative happiness, making them desire nothing more than to stay and eat more lotuses, forgetting their homes and worries. Odysseus had to physically carry back and restrain those sailors who had eaten any lotuses to get them to safety.
• "The Orchid Terror": The narrator is seduced by an unnamed, flower-collecting woman who sends him to retrieve the only flower she does not yet possess. The orchid in question, once retrieved, turns out to possess a sickly-sweet smell so strong that it acts like a narcotic. In the story, the treacherously beautiful and addictive plant is used as a contrast for the similarly alluring and dangerous woman.
• The Pollinators Of Eden: A group of extrasolar explorers comes across a planet populated by sapient flowering plants that produce a perfume so enthralling that the team's botanist opines that, were it released on Earth, it would devastate its ecology in months. The plants ultimately seduce members of the crew into mating with them to serve as pollinators, in a manner compared to how Earth plants trick insects into "mating" with their flowers to spread their pollen.
• The short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" has a man who finds himself living next to a beautiful garden tended by a beautiful young woman. No matter how many times he's told not to go into the garden or deal with the young woman, he cannot take his mind off either. The poor daughter, however, is alone and very much likes the young man paying so much attention to her... only for the man to find out every beautiful plant in the garden is poisonous and now the woman is, too, due to her caring for them.
• "The Purple Terror" has a group of navy officers on leave in Cuba become enraptured by a string of exotic orchids around the neck of an attractive dancing girl, which produce a "queer sickly fragrance" compared to a corpse's. They head out into the jungle to find it and are almost brought down in this hunt when the orchids they seek turn out to be blood-drinking and provided with mobile, vampiric tendrils.
• The Snow Queen: The enchanted garden where Gerda is trapped for a Year Outside, Hour Inside under an amnesia spell is full of beautiful flowers the sorceress uses to try to keep her happy.
• Sorcery!: The first novel has a field of black lotus flowers that emit a powerful, sweet-smelling scent enticing passers-by to automatically stray off their path and then wander into the lotus field, before falling over after breathing in the lotuses' sweet-smelling, fatal poison.
• A field of beautiful poppies in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gives off a scent that irresistibly sends characters to sleep, where they would have lain forever if not rescued.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: The Original Series: In "This Side of Paradise", the landing party visits a colonized planet where everyone seems incredibly happy and peaceful. The reason becomes apparent when Kirk is sprayed with spores from an alien flower and he starts planning for the entire crew to come down and join the colonists.
• Ultraman Tiga: Gijera is a flower-like entity that only blossoms when Gatanozoa's arrival is near. It produces an addicting pollen that puts humans in a state of hypnotic bliss, making them fight each other over the pollen, oblivious to the upcoming apocalypse.

Tabletop Games

• Call of Cthulhu: The Death-Vines of Xiclotl are gigantic carnivorous flowers that produce hypnotic pollen that compels those who inhale it to hurl themselves into the pits where they live.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The vampire rose puts victims to sleep with a soporific fragrance and drains their blood through hollow thorns. Its blossoms are normally white, but turn red as it feeds.
  • Yellow musk creepers are climbing vines whose numerous yellow flowers produce a heady, entrancing musk that lures those who smell it into the heart of the plant, whereupon the creeper's sharp vines quickly skewer the unfortunate and consume their brain. In-game, this is treated as a mind-affecting compulsion place on anyone who gets a good whiff of the plant's pollen.
• Exalted: In Hell, there grows a tree of golden wire and jeweled leaves adorned with amethyst flowers. These blooms emanate an alluring scent and produce profoundly intoxicating nectar resembling a mixture of honey, blood, and heroin. This combination serves to tempt demons into suckling the nectar from the flowers, often becoming profoundly addicted as they do so. This often proves fatal, as the tree drains Essence from creatures that drink its nectar in order to fuel the production of its own demonic offspring and is entirely capable of draining its entranced victims to death.
• Pathfinder:
  • Alraunes are carnivorous, intelligent plants resembling large, ambulatory flowers. They entice prey into approaching by releasing a soothing smell, which they can bolster by opening their flowers to reveal a humanoid body that they can shape to match their target's ideal of beauty. Once its prey is close enough, the alraune kills it and then roots itself in its decomposing corpse.
  • Corpse lotuses are carnivorous flowers that use their sweet, fruity smell to lure prey into the range of the acidic mucus and grasping vines.
  • Furcifers are giant chameleon-like beasts with rows of flowers growing from their backs. These release a sweet-smelling, narcotic pollen that induces a state of euphoria in those that smell it, making them easy prey for the beast. The pollen can also be harvested to make powerful hallucinogenic drugs.
• The Strange: Prances are mutant flowers in Cataclyst that attract prey with alluring blooms, calming perfume, and a magic aura that promotes well-being. Once prey has been put to sleep, prances emerge for a bloody feeding frenzy.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The Bird Flower is a plant native to the jungles of Lustria that produces large, very colorful flowers with a notably phallic style and a sweet-smelling nectar with an intoxicating taste. The plant normally uses its nectar's smell to attract birds, which its flowers then trap and eat, but it can also be ingested by humans as a drug that allows one to glimpse into the future at the cost of opening your mind to dangerous things in the immaterial world. A few such flowers were brought to the Empire by sailors and were afterwards cultivated for their nectar, leading to a spread in the drug's popularity, a string of disappearances, and eventually the banning of the plant's cultivation.

Video Games

• HyperRogue: In the Rose Garden land, the player is compelled to move towards the source of expanding waves of scent from the roses.
• Pokémon: Roserade, a Plant Person Grass-type Pokémon, is noted in its Pokédex descriptions to lure prey to itself by using the sweet scent of the roses growing at the end of its arms. Once its target is close enough, it takes it down using vines bristling with venomous thorns. According to its entries in HeartGold and SoulSilver, the sweetness of its scent is directly correlated to the power of its poison.

Webcomic

• Cursed Princess Club: One sign of Princess Lorena's superior beauty is that huge purple flowers bloom wherever she sleeps, or when she makes a grand entrance. Other witnesses even Lampshade it saying that flowers blooming around someone is a sign of tremendous beauty.

Real Life

• Historically, it's not been uncommon for properties of this sort to be, accurately or not, attributed to flowering plants and their various parts. Roman and medieval writers, for instance, described the bulbs of common orchids as being aphrodisiacs if consumed.
• Plants that depend on insects for pollination often have flowers with patterns that are much more visible in UV light to make them easier to spot by insects that can see in the UV spectrum (such as bees). Others have evolved parts that look like the female of an insect species, causing males to attempt to mate with it and coating themselves with pollen in the process.

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