Born from Plants

In science fiction, beings with Bizarre Alien Biology, or in fantasy, magical beings, which would then overlap with Nature Spirit, don't have to be created through typical biological processes. This trope is when beings are grown out of plants. It's a form of magical, non-sexual birth, in a similar vein to Delivery Stork.

The beings may come from flowers, fruit or vegetable plants or trees. The beings may look like regular beings or they may look different and/or have different powers or abilities. As well, the plant-grown beings may be good and benevolent or they may be evil, malicious beings.

The idea may come from the fact that in nature, fruit is born from flowers, so this trope basically applies this concept to sentient beings.

Compare Plant Person, who may or may not be born from a plant, but does show plant-like characteristics, and Grows on Trees, which is for things that grow on trees, specifically.

This may also be how a Wonder Child is created.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Digimon Adventure: When Togemon, a giant cactus, digivolves to Lilymon, a plant fairy, the Transformation Sequence shows a rose blooming from Togemon's head and releasing Lilymon.
• Maho Girls Pretty Cure!: Ha-chan, the baby fairy, is born when she emerges from a ball of light from a pink flower.
• Mushishi features this with Setsu, a woman who was born from a bamboo shoot in a forest where the Magaridake mushi resides. To some extent her life force is tied to it as well, since the water she drinks from it is what keeps her alive, and constitutes most of her body. Killing it kills her and her daughter after only half a year. At the end of the chapter, both mother and daughter have been reborn in the bamboo shoots that grew over their graves, since a new Magaridake took residence in their bamboo thicket.

Asian Animation

• In the first episode of Tooba Tooba Noonbory, a giant pink lotus flowers blooms, and from it comes a little girl. This little girl is named PinkAru, and becomes a primary cast member as she is adopted into Noonbory and Hanubi's family.

Comic Books

• Batman: Poison Ivy is known for making plant animal hybrids to serve her.
• Swamp Thing: The original Swamp Thing was retconned into being a plant that thought it was a human. Rebirth from plants is par for course for any avatar of the Green.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Rykornians are born from giant corn-like stalks, and then use the husks they crawled out of as their homes.

Fairy Tales

• Tale type ATU 407, "The Girl as Flower", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, deals with the heroine as a flower: either cursed to become a flower, or born as one. In the latter tales, when the tree or branch that the heroine comes from becomes a large tree, the heroine simply comes out of the plant as an adult maiden:
  • The Daughter of the Rose (Romania).
• Mabinogion: The perfect woman Blodeuwedd is created from the flowers and growing things of the earth: her hair is effectively made of flowers. Later, for her sins and heartlessness, she is turned into the first owl and fated to haunt the night - the flowers that became human hair now mutate into feathers.
• Momotarō: The titular boy is discovered by an old couple inside a giant peach, taking the place of the peach pit. In older versions of the story, Momotaro was their biological child, and eating the peach instead made the old couple young enough to have children.
• The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter: A bamboo cutter finds a tiny thumb-sized, glowing baby inside a bamboo stem. He takes her home to his wife and they name her Kaguya-hime. She grows up to a normal-sized, unearthly beauty who many men, including the Emperor, fall in love with. She ends up returning to whence she came, the moon. This space alien subtext is stronger depending on the variation you read.
• Thumbelina, as essentially, she is a wingless fairy born from a flower, and she even gets wings part way through her story.
• The Javanese folktale Timun Mas tells the story of a girl who was born from a golden cucumber, hence her name.
• Urikohime and the Amanojaku: Urikohime is a woman born from a melon. Technically "uri" means any cucurbit, but the common interpretation is specifically a melon. Her Evil Counterpart, the amanojaku, rarely is also born from a melon.

Fan Works

• Halkegenia Online: As said in Chapter 34:
  wild pixies are like little helpers to Yggdrasil, they protect and tend to World Tree and its offshoots. They spawn from a rare species of flower that only buds in the presence of the World Tree or one of its shoots and only blossoms on the night of a full moon. ALfheim lore says that Navigation Pixies are wild pixies that are born from a Yggdrasil Blossom that blooms in captivity.
• In the third story of The Smurfette Village series, the Smurfs discover their birth origin as born from plants grown in a garden that is watched over by the goddess Gaia.

Films — Live-Action

• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978): The body snatchers take the form of flowers that touch a person, and then form a pod from where the original dies when their emotionless duplicate emerges, making the "kill" part of Kill and Replace, essentially automatic.

Literature

• In The Cabbage Patch Fib by Paul Jennings, a father tells his son the story about babies growing out of cabbages, so the boy goes to look in the cabbage patch and finds a green baby that apparently did grow out of a cabbage.
• This is how everyone is born in the world of The Twelve Kingdoms. Special magical trees grow in every village, town and city and when a married couple pray to the heaven's before one a fruit may bud that when grown to a large enough size will split to produce a human infant (with individual branches marked to tell which fruit belongs to which couple). Not just people either, animals as well with similar trees being kept in villages for domestic livestock while ones deep in the woods produce wild animals and youkai while a single tree on a holy mountain gives birth to the Kirin for all of the twelve titular kingdoms as needed.
• The "piggies" of the Ender's Game sequels reproduce this way, as does all other complex life on their planet; this was an adaptation to survive the Descolada.
• In the the secret lives of Princesses, princesses are planted.

Live-Action TV

• Round the Twist: In "The Cabbage Patch Fib", Pete tells his little brother Bronson the story about babies growing out of cabbages, so Bronson goes to look in the cabbage patch and finds a green baby that apparently did grow out of a cabbage.

Myths & Religion

• Philippine Mythology: The first man and woman were said to be born from a bamboo tree that was split in half.
• In France (and other European countries), when they wanted to avoid The Talk, parents sometimes told their children that little boys were born in cabbages and little girls in roses. This is becoming less and less common, though, and mostly Played for Laughs.
• In the Mabinogion, the perfect woman Blodeuwedd is created from the flowers and growing things of the earth: her hair is effectively made of flowers. Later, for her sins and heartlessness, she is turned into the first owl and fated to haunt the night — the flowers that became human hair now mutate into feathers.
• In Brazilian Folklore, Sacis-Pererês — mischievous tricksters with the appearance of a black child with one leg and a magic red cap who like to play pranks on humans — are said to be born from bamboo sticks.
• In Norse Mythology, the Aesir created the first humans, Ask and Embla, from trees.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons adventure OA7 Test of the Samurai. The Player Characters can meet Oe-Urai, AKA the Peachling Girl. One day while a man was fishing, he found a peach floating in the water. After he picked up the peach, it burst open and out stepped Oe-Urai.

Toys

• Cabbage Patch Kids are born in cabbage patches.

Video Games

• Everquest II: The Fae are born from a special flower in a nursery not far off from the city of Kelethin. The race's affinity to nature means that whenever they pass away from natural causes or old age, their spirit is deposited into the flowers where a new Fae is born in a cycle of reincarnation. The Dark Elves of Neriak managed to steal away some of those flowers and used magic to corrupt them, leading to the creation of the evil Arasai race.
• Fairy Bloom Freesia: Fairies are born from flowers, and inherit qualities, like disposition to humans, from them, as said by the Jomon Tree in Day 10, as he attributes Freesia's sympathy to humans due to her birth flower:
  Jomon Tree: (to Freesia) Your birth flower must have been sympathetic to humans. […]
  Fairies are born from flowers and some types of flower enjoying living with humans. Your birth flower must have been one that enjoys being around humans.
• Inverted in the Pokémon franchise with the fairy-type Flabebe line, where it's not that they are born from flowers, but that they live on, and turn into, a flower as they evolve, and possibly die. They are born from eggs like every other breedable Pokemon, and they start from hatching, already with a flower. Flabebe's sprite contains a large flower that they cling to. Flabébé's Y and Alpha Sapphire Pokedex entries states: "When it finds a flower it likes, it dwells on that flower its whole life long. It floats in the wind's embrace with an untroubled heart.", while the last sentence of the X and Omega Ruby entries is: "The flower Flabébé holds is most likely part of its body." As a Florges, it seems to become fused with its flower.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series: The episode "House & Garden", Poison Ivy creates "children" that are grown from pods in a giant plant. They start out looking human, but eventually mutate into huge, hideous cactus-men.
• Cow and Chicken: One episode has Cow asking where she came from. When she asks her mom and dad, they tell her that she was born in a lettuce patch. She doesn't take this well nor does she accept it as the answer she is looking for.
• In Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, the Monster Minds sprout from green organic vines.
• In Winx Club, the pixies are born from a huge flower called The Tree of Life.

Real Life

Jellyfish and other medusozoans are the closest equivalent to this trope in real life, beginning life as a stationary, anemone-like "polyp", which several mobile adult "medusas" then bud off from.

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