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Green capitalism taken to its logical conclusion.
"I didn't know that words grew on trees," said Milo timidly. [...]
"Well, money doesn't grow on trees, does it?" 9demanded the count.
"I've heard not," said Milo.
"Then something must. Why not words?" exclaimed the undersecretary triumphantly.

A fantasy trope, mostly confined to children's fantasy, where trees don't just grow fruit, they grow anything you could want. Sometimes it's food, and sometimes it's something like shoes, or hammers, or whatever the author wants.

The idea of a money tree is also a great fantasy, even though you'd need a pretty big Artistic License in Economics to believe that buying things with such money is any more sustainable or ethical than counterfeiting.

Compare Level Ate, for more useful landscaping, and Solid Gold Poop for another money-for-nothing scenario as well as Body to Jewel for when it's not trees, but the (human) body which produces jewelry specifically. See also Mining for Cookies, for the subterranean equivalent of this trope.

If a plant is a potential source of anything you might want, but its parts still need to be processed before they're usable, it's a Multipurpose Monocultured Crop.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • In a series of adverts for Barclays Bank in 2004, Donald Sutherland tells Gary Oldman all about an old friend of his who learned how to grow money trees, and soon owned a thousand forests of them.
    Gary: Well, if money trees are real, how come you ain't got one?
    Donald: Are you crazy? If it were that simple, we'd all be growing them!
  • In McDonaldland, apple pies grow on trees, and French Fries grow on bushes.
  • An advertisement for Nutro dog food shows this as one of a few unusual ways of puppies coming into being, also showing them hatching from eggs and being found growing inside fruits and vegetables.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Endro~!: It is revealed in episode 9 that the magical Cartado cards the characters use are not manufactured, but grown.
  • Zekkyou Gakkyuu: In one story, a girl discovers that the source of a classmate's family's wealth is a bonsai tree that grows bills. She steals it for herself and her family uses it to live more prosperous lives, but then her father mysteriously vanishes. The girl discovers far too late that the tree gets nutrients by sucking people underground and eating them. Unfortunately, the tree has by that point eaten her classmate's family, her own parents, and herself.

    Card Games 

    Comic Books 
  • One Deadpool story had the Korean government use Wade's DNA to splice the powers of other mutants onto their own citizens in horrific experiments that eventually result in total organ failure. After liberating them, Deadpool takes them to Monster City, where they have a demonic tree that can grow replacement organs from their genetic samples on a daily basis.
  • In De Cape et de Crocs, there is an island where cheese and eggs grow on trees. It's later revealed they come from the moon, where almost everything, including precious gems and gold, grows on trees. Selenites think of gold as an annoying weed. The only currency on the moon is poetry.
  • Judge Dredd has treemeat plantations, from which farmers harvest meat that grows on mutant trees.
  • A Mandrake the Magician story takes place in a country of botanists who developed plants for any — and I mean any — possible purpose. Just a few examples: fluorescent lamppost-like trees, self-cooking potatoes, steak bushes, nylon stocking plants, giant mushroom houses which grow complete with central heating and electrical wiring. The most far-fetched is probably the transport — miles-long trailing vines that grow at 40 MPH with passengers clinging to the leaves.
  • In Philémon, the shipwrecked man sends messages in bottles he harvests from a bottle tree.

    Fan Works 
  • Twilight Sparkle Solves Carnivory: Twilight Sparkle decides to solve the ethical issues inherent in carnivory by creating a meat tree. The issue is that, unlike the examples where a regular tree grows something exotic on its branches, this is an entire tree made out of skinless meat and vascular tissues. The presentation goes... poorly, partly due to the audiences' visceral reaction to the tree itself and partly from carnivorous species resenting what they feel to be ponies attempting to push their own cultural maxims onto them.
  • In the Discworld tale The Price of Flight by A.A. Pessimal, a "Russian" witch is sent by Vetinari to Mono Island, to convey his greetings to The God of Evolution. After a speed-evolving bush pours a cup of hot tea for her, and her Feegle navigator discovers a shrub whose sap tastes of whisky, she wishes she'd thought to ask for a glass of vodka. On a subsequent visit, her "German" co-pilot discovers a schnapps shrub.

    Film — Animated 

    Film — Live-Action 
  • In Big Top Pee-wee, Pee-Wee Herman is a farmer who keeps a hot dog tree under wraps.
  • In Kamen Rider Wizard in Magic Land, protagonist Haruto is utterly gobsmacked to find Magic Land's version of the Second Rider Nitoh fishing for squeeze-bottles of mayonnaise (which even flop in the bucket like fish). Nitoh's response is "Of course I am! What, does it grow on trees where you come from?", complete with a brief Imagine Spot.
  • In Magic Island, the protagonist (a kid from the present-day) sees a tree on the eponymous island which has slices of hot pepperoni pizza growing from its branches. Later, a couple of pirates find the same tree, which is now growing legs of roast chicken. It's also guarded by a land shark.

    Jokes 
  • The joke about an irate mother whose child keeps taking apples from the kitchen: "Apples don't grow on trees, you know!"
  • A two-panel comic features a hunter wandering into a section of the woods filled with trees that have cash sprouting from their limbs, and turning to the reader to comment "Great. Now what the hell am I gonna tell the kids?"

    Literature 
  • The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Fox and the Cat tell Pinocchio that if he plants some gold coins in the ground, they will grow into a tree with a thousand gold coins growing on it. It turns out to be a fraud.
  • Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree is a Little Golden Book based on Sesame Street. In this book, a witch owns a cookie tree, and casts a spell on it so that it will only give cookies to people who will share them to keep Cookie Monster from eating its cookies. The spell works, but a little too well, as now the tree won't give the witch any cookies, either. At the end of the book, Cookie and the witch form an alliance and agree to share the cookies with each other (of course, Cookie gets carried away and ends up eating all of the cookies anyway).
  • Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex has an illustration depicting the Colombian condom bush (Citcalyhporp rebbur).
  • The Diamond Age has the Chinese trying to create nanotech "Seed" devices that sprout into items and buildings when planted. They do this to end reliance on the western-controlled "Feed", a Matter Replicator system with a centralized architecture.
  • Dirge for Prester John features a tree that produces books.
  • Discworld:
    • The Last Continent takes this trope to extremes. A god of evolution causes trees and bushes to sprout with anything the wizards who land on the island desire, up to and including cigarettes. Let's just say that, when they decide to leave the island, a fully organic ship turns up, complete with a figurehead (with a disturbing resemblance to the only female on the party).
    • The Discworld Atlas mentions that FourEcks (the "vaguely australian" country) has a pasta bush. This has been introduced to Brindisi (the "vaguely italian" country), but they're suspicious that it's not proper pasta.
  • In Evolution, the last descendants of man live five hundred million years from now in symbiosis with borametz-like trees (and symbiosis means that they're literally born of said trees) on the Mars-like, arid, and hot plains of Pangaea Ultima.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
    • In Life, the Universe and Everything, it is explained that since the universe is so very large, everything one could possibly manufacture is growing somewhere as a natural product. The two things he mentions specifically are mattresses (apparently a swamp-dwelling animal species), and screwdriver trees.
    • In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a culture of idiots that has just been transplanted to the prehistoric Earth decides to make leaves their national currency, then immediately begin burning down trees to fight inflation.
  • Land of Oz:
    • In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and co. come upon lunch-box and dinner-pail trees in the country of Ev, with napkins for leaves, each separate food item including cakes and ham sandwiches having its own stem inside.
    • In Tik-Tok of Oz, the inhabitants of Oogaboo are named after the crops they grow on their orchard trees — Jo Apple, Jo Candy, Jo Stockings, Jo Files, etc. Jo Files also has a storybook tree, where the stories are "dull and confusing" if they're picked too soon, but if you wait until they're ripe, they're excellent. In the same book, a prisoner in the Nome King's domain survives by eating off what he calls "Hotel Trees", which grow coconut-looking things you can unscrew to reveal they contain a three-course dinner, from soup to nuts.
  • The Lotus Caves: The protagonists find a cave filled with plant life that responds to their desires. This includes a tree that reshapes itself to be a diving board over their swimming hole.
  • The Magical Monarch of Mo. In the land of Mo, everything the people need in their daily lives grows on trees. This includes swords, hats, rings, peanuts, medicine, preserved apricots, shrimp salad, animal crackers, and bicycles.
  • In The Magician's Nephew, the kids plant a piece of toffee and it grows into a toffee tree (overnight!), although it only produces remarkably toffee-like fruit instead of actual toffee. They also manage to produce gold and silver trees out of dropped coins, as well as the much more famous iron bar that grows into a gaslamp-post. When Uncle Andrew realizes the implications of this effect, he starts talking about coming back with guns to take over Narnia and make a fortune turning scrap metal into battleships and train cars. Aslan later explains that his scheme wouldn't have worked, because the only reason Narnia was doing this was that it had been created only the previous day, and it still had a sort of echo of that power in it. Within a few days, the effects would fade and only regular seeds would produce trees.
  • The Pendragon Adventure: Played for Laughs.
    Boon: Food doesn't grow on trees, you know!
  • Pettson and Findus: In A Rumpus in the Garden, Pettson is planting carrots. Findus doesn't like carrots, so he plants a meatball instead.
  • The Phantom Tollbooth: Letters grow on trees. When Milo questions this, they point out that money doesn't grow on trees, but something must — why not words? (Numbers, by the way, are mined.)
  • Slaughterhouse-Five: One of Kilgore Trout's short stories is about a tree that grows money. It's fertilised by the blood of humans who fight over its leaves.
  • Snow Crash has a dog whose virtual reality includes steaks growing on trees.
  • La sorciere du placard à balais (The witch from the broom closet): The main character ends up with a macaroni tree in his garden.
  • The Star Diaries: One story has such plants. However, they've been left uncultivated for several generations and the cross-pollination has created some bizarre results (like carnivorous, ambulatory furniture).
  • The Story of Ferdinand features a cork tree that has bottle corks growing on its branches like acorns. In Real Life, cork does grow on trees, but as bark that needs to be peeled off and shaped.
  • The Talking Parcel by Gerald Durrell: In the Magical Land of Mythologia, this is the default means of producing many common items: bottles and corks are each plucked off their own respective tree, for example. The main characters' guide finds the real-world version of a "cork tree" rather ridiculous by comparison.
  • The Thousand and One Nights: The tale of Aladdin features a grove in the cave where the lamp is found, where grow trees producing, for instance, emeralds the shape (and size) of Pears. Of course, you'll die if you try to take them...
  • Treehorns Treasure: Treehorn puts some money his parents give him in a hole in a tree, as a hiding spot. The next day, he notices that the tree is now growing bills, as if they were fruit (he keeps from picking some on the basis that they didn't seem "ripe"). The whole thing ends abruptly, when he takes the money out of the tree at his dad's request (bizarrely, they never noticed the tree now growing money and Treehorn himself was weirdly indifferent to it).
  • The Vorkosigan Saga novel Cetaganda, set on a planet where genetic engineering is a high art, has a tree that has kittens as its "fruit". They don't survive being "plucked", however, if not ripe yet. The man who plucked one (attracted by their sleeping mewing) thought they were somehow glued to the tree and failed to look before effectively ripping one in half.
  • Where the Sidewalk Ends: The poem "The Garden" is about a man who grows plants that have fruits made of gems, gold, and silver.
  • Xanth uses it a lot as part of a general "fantastical flora" theme. Furs are grown on fur trees, shoes on shoe trees, pies on pie trees, etc. Many trees are hostile, though, so tread lightly.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Community: Played with in "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas". The plants in Carol Canyon produce Christmas carols instead of oxygen. Don't worry, they are all in the public domain.
  • Malcolm in the Middle: A real version, Played for Laughs. Hal warns his sons not to waste orange juice, because "that stuff doesn't grow on trees."
    Hal: Wait a second, it does. Then why is it so darn expensive!?
  • Panorama (a British news show), in a rather infamous April Fool's Day gag, had a report about a successful crop of spaghetti from Swiss spaghetti trees, following an effective treatment against the spaghetti weevil. Hilariously, people believed this report was true and wrote in asking how they could get this spaghetti tree. The BBC responded with "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best".

    Manhua 
  • Old Master Q: One strip has Mr. Chiu showing Old Master Q his cool new plant, a tree that literally grows money instead of leaves, though only in tiny, 1-dollar notes. When Master Q tries picking one of the notes for himself, Chiu stopped him, telling him "wait a few days, the notes will become 10 dollars." Master Q did return days later, and sure enough, said tree now has 10-dollar notes on its branches. Chiu stopped him again, saying "Come back in a week, it'll grow 100 dollars..." cue a week later, and Master Q returns to see Chiu in a depressed state. Turns out that after growing a bunch of 100-dollar notes, the tree has subsequently wilted and died.

    Music 
  • The children's CD and book The Underwater Melon Man featured Fane Flaws' song "Money Trees".
    "If money does not grow on trees, pray tell me then just what are these?"
  • "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" by Harry McClintock and various other related versions of the hobo-ballad going back to the Medieval concept of the "Cockaigne", an Earthly, idyllic paradise where all needs are met without need for toil. The McClintock version and several others refer not only to Cigarette Trees, but to lakes of stew and whiskey, and springs of soda pop, lemonade, or alcohol.
  • "Liar", a German cabaret song covered by Ute Lemper on her album Berlin Cabaret Songs, contains a reference to a tree to produces steaming hot black coffee when you tap its trunk.
  • "On Top of Spaghetti" features a meatball that rolls off a plate, out the door of the restaurant, and under a bush. The next year it grows into a meatball tree. The song doesn't really make much sense.
  • There is a song sung in Welsh primary schools about various birds sitting in trees. The first verse is pretty normal and tells of a yellow bird in a banana tree. Then the second mentions a red bird in a tomato tree. The third is about a green bird in a cucumber tree, and just when you thought it couldn't get any stranger, the fourth verse is about a blue bird in a bubblegum tree.
  • The second verse of an Australian children's song called "Kookaburra:"
    "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
    Eating all the gum drops he can see
    Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra!
    Leave some there for me"

    Mythology 
  • In the Popol Vuh, Hun Hunahpu's head didn't grow on the tree it was placed on, but Xquic thought it did, and some versions say that the tree's actual fruit looked like heads.

    Radio 
  • Bleak Expectations: Mattress are grown on trees - the more ripe they are, the softer they are. Pip manages to fall into a mattress orchard after falling off a cliff, but sadly they aren't ripe, and he's pretty badly hurt.
  • At the end of the Captain Kremmen radio series, our hero decides to take a well-earned break from saving the universe and go to the Pleasure Planet.
    President: The Pleasure Planet, huh? I hear they have trees that grow sirloin steaks there.
    Kremmen: Yes sir, they're very rare.
    President: That's a shame. I like mine well done.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons: One of the potential methods of dragon reproduction discussed in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons is that there is a magical tree, somewhere in the Underdark or a primeval wilderness, that grows dragon eggs like fruit. Dragons in a family mood must track this tree down and talk its warden into giving them an egg.
  • World Tree (RPG): As a consequence of the game's world being a single giant tree, anything not directly botanical in nature — such as wood and amber — can be very hard to come by. The creator gods mitigated this issue by creating numerous plants that naturally grow such materials, such as by depositing metal nuggets, small rocks or gemstones, salt, and similar materials in their leaves, stems, thorns, fruit and so on.

    Theatre 
  • Iolanthe: The Chancellor's nightmare song mentions trees grown by planting people associated with making their "fruit" — a grocer will grow into a tree with many kinds of regular fruit, a baker into one that grows pastries, and so on.
    You get a good spadesman to plant a small tradesman (first take off his boots with a boot-tree),
    And his legs will take root, and his fingers will shoot, and they'll blossom and bud like a fruit-tree—
    From the greengrocer tree you get grapes and green pea, cauliflower, pineapple, and cranberries,
    While the pastrycook plant cherry brandy will grant, apple puffs, and three-corners, and Banburys—

    Video Games 
  • In Animal Crossing:
    • Random items can appear in trees, as leaves are used to represent stored items and any fallen leaf can resolve into, say, a piece of furniture when picked up.
    • It's possible to grow a money tree by planting a bag of Bells with a golden shovel or in the hole dug in a spot where the ground is shining, which will grow crops of bags containing an amount of money equal to how much was buried.
    • The mechanics of this is changed in New Horizons. Each day, a glowing spot appears on the island. If dug up, it produces a bag of 1,000 bells. It goes away once filled in. But if you bury a bag of money in that spot, it becomes a sprout for a new money tree. Bags up to 10k will eventually bear similarly-sized bags of money in a set of three, though only once per money tree. Beyond a bag of 10,000 bells, the resulting fruit bags will randomize, becoming a bit of a gamble.
  • In Anti-Idle: The Game, the Garden feature lets you plant trees that generate Yellow Coins that you can harvest.
  • Castlevania: The Wakwak Tree in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin grows Fleamen.
  • Densetsu no Stafy 3: Trees in the jungle with orange palm leaves somehow grow meat, as it falls from said trees when you attack them. This can be used to distract certain enemies.
  • Digimon: While it doesn't technically grow on trees per se, meat grows from the ground like a vegetable.
  • FarmVille: The game started out with a selection of fairly regular fruit trees, but the proliferation of special trees for various events ended up taking this to some pretty wild extremes. Not only is there a money tree, there are also bubble gum trees, cookie trees, jewel trees, marshmallow trees, candy heart trees, paper lantern trees, rainbow trees (that is, not simply a multicolored tree, but a tree that grows tiny rainbows as fruit), galaxy trees (where the canopy is literally a tiny galaxy hovering over the branches, and the fruit seems to be stars) and countless others. If you can think of it, there's probably a tree that grows it.
  • The Flowering Nose: Several items may be planted in the Flowering Nose's special garden. Each one grows into a fruit-bearing bush.
    • This includes food like cheese and donuts.
    • It also includes vegetables like carrots, which hang from the bush like tomatoes.
  • Grow: You can grow a big tree with blue leaves that produce bombs.
  • Guild Wars 2: One of the playable races, the sylvari Plant People, grows from special trees like humanoid fruit.
  • In Just More Doors, you can plant radio seeds. You do get a tree out of it, and it bears radios as "fruits".
  • In plenty The Legend of Zelda games you can find bomb flowers growing on the ground. they are flowers whose fruit are bombs that light up the moment you pick them up. Gorons take these fruits and process them to create normal bombs.
  • Minecraft:
    • In some Game Mods, this trope appears as crops rather than trees. IndustrialCraft and the Spiritual Successor to its crop system, Agricraft, provide various plants that can be mutated from others via crossbreeding and grow small amounts of mineable materials. The requirement is that these plants need to have a block of their respective ores below their soil, whether to grow them or to be obtained via mutation. Ore-producing plants and trees appear in several other mods, usually with similar requirements in terms of needing to be planted on stone, ore or mineral blocks or requiring lava to "water" them.
    • Another mod, Magical Crops, allows making similar plants, not limited by the ore block requirement but more expensive and limited by other traits, that are not limited to mineable resources. Other than the ore plants, there are mob plants, crops that can provide resources from mobs like beef, string and Wither Skeleton skulls. There are also four elemental plants, whose produce can be made into many different types of common resources like dirt, clay, cobblestone and snow, and the Nature plant, whose produce can be made into different plant matter items.
  • Might and Magic: In the fourth game, Clouds of Xeen, many of the trees in Vertigo have a few gold pieces hidden in their leaves. In 3: Isles of Terra, many trees scattered around the world have treasure hidden in their branches.
  • Money Tree: Leaves fall down out of the sky and you attach them to the formerly-bare tree. While most grow only mundane fruit, now and again you'll get one that grows paper money.
  • In PixelJunk Monsters it's never a waste of time to sprint through the trees whilst your babies are getting eaten.
  • Rimworld: The venerable "Vegetable Garden Project" Game Mod puts a sci-fi spin on this trope with the "Resource Plants" module, which are genetically engineered plants that (very, very slowly) leach the metal content out of the soil beneath them and compress it into a usable form. Useful as a late-game option when you've mined out all the easily accessible metal deposits on the map (at least in prior versions before the ability to send caravans to other tiles was added) but generally Awesome, but Impractical otherwise.
  • The Sims:
    • Money trees can be grown in several games.
    • The Sims 2 Money Trees are potted house plants that must be watered regularly or will wither away. They're the cheapest aspiration reward and a Boring, but Practical source of money that can net 1200 Simoleons per day in ideal circumstances.
    • The Sims 3 lets you grow cheese, egg, burger and steak plants, and also has the omni-plant, which can grow almost anything. There are also real Money Trees which are actual trees this time and not house plants. They must be taken care off though, or else they will wither and explode, releasing bills which must be paid.
    • The Sims 4 has Trash Plants, which are the byproduct of letting garbage sit out in the open for too long. Once they reach full maturity, they can be harvested for Trash Fruit, which is used to grow — you guessed it — more Trash Plants.
  • Splatoon: Referenced during one of the stage announcements for Kelp Dome: Callie states that anything you plant in the dome will grow really well, to which Marie jokingly responds that she wants to plant some french fries.
  • Spore Creatures: The "Meat Trees Banana Beasts" cheat will replace all the fruits in trees with various meat items. Can also occur if you have the "Alternate Food" cheat enabled, which can results in things like donuts and waffles growing from trees as well.
  • Stone: The inhabitants of the planet Rain use leaves as currency. It rains all the time on Rain, so there is no danger of a deflationary forest-clearing project like in Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
  • World of Warcraft brought farming to Azeroth in Mists of Pandaria. Along with standard vegetables and fruits that can be grown, there are plants you can grow that give ore for blacksmithing, herbs for herbalism, cloth for tailoring, and even magical enchantment essences.

    Webcomics 
  • A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe:
    • The miscellanopod trees grow a wide assortment of items in their pods and flowers, such as bacon or weaponry. Hundreds of years in the future, they're humanity's only source of... pretty much everything, seeing as nearly all of the universe was destroyed long ago.
    • The clockwork tree grows giant lightbulbs that, when disturbed, fall, burst and create clockwork enemies.
  • Full Frontal Nerdity: In one story arc, the guys have gotten their hands on a blender that combines anything put into it — and not in the normal way. Nelson and Frank test it out with such things as the "banana-steak" and the "habanero-peach", but Lewis goes straight to putting money and acorns into the blender to get seeds for a money tree. (He also uses it to combine Red Bull and Miracle-Gro fertilizer, so he won't have to wait for his harvest.) Fortunately for the economy, Frank and Nelson manage to kill the trees by blending septic tank root-killer with articles about Bitcoin and inflation, thermite, and Lewis' unpaid credit card bills.
  • Gaia has a sausage tree and a "steakolon" (a watermelon made of meat) in a banquet scene that one would initially mistake for a dream sequence.
  • The Order of the Stick: A sword tree shows up as a gag in a print-only bonus strip in the second book collection, No Cure for the Paladin Blues. Roy's sword was destroyed and he's stuck without a replacement because they sold the other magic swords they found in the dungeon. While in the forest, Roy is forced to use a non-magical greatclub due to lack of alternatives, complaining that "swords don't grow on trees" (unlike the club, which is just a stout branch he tore off a trunk). Naturally, the last panel of the page shows the group narrowly missing an encounter with "the world famous sword-growing tree."
  • Penny Arcade: played on in this strip, where Tycho believes that "the back" (as in when a store employees "checks in the back" to see if there's a copy of a desired item) contains trees and bushes that grow desirable goods like fruit.
  • In Tales of the Questor, a Journeyman Biomancer creates a species of plant designed to absorb "bauxite contamination" out of the water and soil. The plants dispose of the contamination by forming it into berries — of solid aluminum (check the punchline). Save for a couple of variant plants that produce rubies and sapphires...
  • Schlock Mercenary has the eyeball-tree. It turns out that Carbosilicate Amorphs grow their eyeballs separately...
  • Tower of God has Jigena's Flower, which grows jewels on is blossom. The plant is, however, parasitic and in a giant sea monster.

    Web Original 
  • Cyanide and Happiness: This video features a bacon tree. You have to climb high enough to reach the crispy ones!
  • The Money Tree by Neil Cicierega, a short film about a tree that grows money and originated from a dollar bill planted in the ground.
  • Orion's Arm: Deliplants are genetically-engineered plants that grow animal products, which is more efficient and ethical than using animals. A similar, if less literal example, are meatshrooms, which are mushrooms with the taste, texture, and nutritional qualities of meat.
  • SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-038, the Everything Tree, grows copies of anything that touches its bark. It's capable of growing even fully formed and living clones of organisms that touch it, although these clones age quickly and only live a couple of weeks.
    • Another one is a tree that grows fruit identical to human corpses hanging by the neck, which were at first mistaken for suicides.
    • SCP-392 is a tree that grows human heads, similar to the Popol Vuh example above.
    • SCP-417, the Plague Tree, has fruits that contain insects whose bite causes horrific diseases.
    • SCP-1147, the Adaptive Plum Tree, whose seeds grow into a tree made of whatever substance they're planted in. For example, planting one in charcoal made a burnt-looking tree that grew highly flammable plums, while planting one in wax made a wax tree with plum-shaped scented candles for fruit.
    • SCP-6949 is a species of tree that grows US dollar bills when pollinated.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: The Kiwi specialize in Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables, so much so that this trope is a galactic punch line when talking about the species. In the pilot episode, a human and Andorian botanist joke about growing shoes.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball: Nicole Watterson goes on a rant believing Gumball thinks money grows on trees (after his constant opening of the car window (then caused by Rob using a space-time-altering control remote) distracted Nicole that led to crashing into a mess of crashed cars). During the rant, though, she backpedals and says trees are used to make dollars so technically the expression is right to some point, before going back to rant more, culminating with her doing incoherent angry sounds.
  • In Back to the Future, Jules grows a money tree, but the bills wither once they're picked. Which is for the better, as the Department of Treasury's Secret Service considered it Counterfeit Cash.
  • Camp Lazlo: One episode has the Jelly Cabin trio grow a lollipop tree for all the forest animals. A scene that plays during the end credits has Chip and Skip plant a rubber glove to try and grow a rubber glove tree, but only succeed in growing a stethoscope tree.
  • Darkwing Duck: In one episode, Bushroot developed a money tree that produced counterfeit bills. While it provided him with endless cash, the real purpose of the bills were that they were like seeds that would turn into vines when placed into safes containing real money; the vines would then carry said safes back to the supervillain.note 
  • Dave the Barbarian, has Princess Candy getting a visit from a collector, saying she must pay for her toys, as the they don't grow on trees. Cut to a farmer picking up toys from bushes, saying it will be easier if they came up from trees.
  • DuckTales (2017): "Raiders of the Doomsday Vault!" is set in a fictionalised version of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which includes the seed of a money tree, among other mythological plants. As well as banknotes for leaves, the tree has gold for bark, and grows really fast.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Here's Mud In Your Ed", Rolf helps Jimmy get back at Eddy for scamming him by selling Eddy a seed for a bogus "money tree".
  • Gravity Falls: Mentioned when the gang visits Mabeland in "Weirdmageddon 2: Escape from Reality".
    Dippy Fresh: Hey, take a chill pill. Those grow on trees here.
    Dipper: You stay out of this, Dippy Fresh!
  • Lost in Oz has the lunchpail tree planted by Ojo and his father, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The contents of the pails varies from year to year.
  • In OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes a powerful energy source known as glorbs grow on trees. And an exceptionally large one grows underneath the bodega KO works at, it's kept very well guarded.
  • Robot and Monster: According to one episode, bacon grows on trees.
  • In Rocko's Modern Life, Mr. Bighead has salmon bushes in his garden. He is furious with Rocko when he finds Spunky eating from them.
  • The Simpsons:
    • In one episode, Homer falls asleep in church and dreams that he and Marge are Adam and Eve. One of the things available for their enjoyment in the Garden of Eden is the "porno bush", as well as another bush containing the more innocuous People magazine (featuring just them, since they're the only people around).
    • Another episode has Homer and Grandpa return to their old family farm while touring the state as Snake Oil Salesmen. Homer decides to go and see if a hotdog tree he planted has grown.
    • On "Treehouse of Horror" short has Homer travel back in time and accidentally alter history by changing some small thing in the distant past. He spends the majority of the episode repeatedly going back and changing different things, creating different Alternate Timelines while trying to get back to his own. He eventually ends up in a seemingly perfect timeline: his family is filthy rich, his kids are well-behaved, and Patty and Selma have recently died. Homer seems very content to stay in this timeline, until he finds out that donuts were apparently never invented, causing him to run screaming back to his time machine. Right after he leaves, donuts start falling from the sky, and Marge groans in annoyance, "Darn, it's raining again".
  • The Smurfs (1981) has an episode where Gargamel's mother plants a money tree outside Greedy's house to test his avarice. Although the "money" it produces is actually a confectionery wrapped in golden paper called a "golden goodie", it has the effect of drawing the Smurfs to it and trading what they thought was personally valuable just to have a single piece of the money tree's candy.
  • ThunderCats: One of the primary benefits of taking on the Ro-Bear Berbils as allies was that it also gave the Thundercats access to their massive orchard of trees. The fruits of said trees were pretty much any food one could think of, from vegetables, to meat, to bread, and even the (in)famous Candy Fruits.
  • The Wuzzles: An authentic money tree appears in one episode.

    Other 
  • There is a plant called the silver dollar plant, because the seed pods can be dried, and then the outer membrane can be rubbed off of these to reveal a shiny silver surface that kind of resembles a coin. (Sadly, that's where the resemblance to a money tree ends.) You'll often see these as accents in dried floral arrangements.
  • Many Mesoamerican cultures used cacao beans as currency. The beans, naturally, grow on cocoa trees, and are the main ingredient in chocolate, doubling as Practical Currency.
  • The popular bonsai plant Crassula ovata is nicknamed the "jade plant", the "lucky plant" and the "money tree" for its supposed power to bring good financial luck. Superstitions about the plant include your finances being in good shape if the plant's leaves are healthy and succulent, as well as it being bad luck if one of the leaves is removed or broken off.
  • In many Tarot decks the seven of coins (or pentacles) depicts a bored-looking farmer tending a plant growing gold coins. In an aversion of the usual depiction of this trope the card is often interpreted to mean something related to hard work yielding financial reward.
  • At one point during the Premiership of Conservative Party Prime Minister Theresa May, her speechwriting team demonstrated a fondness for pointing out that there was no "Magic Money Tree" to fund certain services, thus necessitating cuts. When subsequent Conservative administrations increased spending on other things (without any accompanying moves to increase revenues), commentators were quick to point out the irony.
  • There's also the old legend of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, known sometimes as Barometz, in Central Asia.
  • While many useful things do grow on trees on Earth, it's sometimes speculated that in an infinite universe, given enough time, a tree might evolve on some planet that produces Philip's head screwdrivers, and only that, while another planet a million light years away might grow Phillip's head screws, simply because although the odds are ridiculously low a truly infinite universe would produce them eventually.

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