Let’s get the New Year off to a scary flying start with a look at monstrous even man-eating plants. There have always been strange or mythical plants but from the second half of the 19thc they take on new and often terrifying forms, especially in fiction.
What caused this fascination with hostile or mutant plants ? The answer seems to be the pioneering scientific work about evolution by none other than Charles Darwin. That might seem like a strange claim but read on to find out more… and to discover why, even if unwittingly, Darwin started a whole new genre of plant-related fiction which started with the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar! But everything is not always as it seems as you’ll see if you read on…
Of course there have always been reports of strange or marvellous plants, both factual and fictional. Everything from the barnacle tree which grew geese as its fruit, mandrake which screamed like an animal if it was pulled up, or the vegetable lamb of Tartary which I’ve written about on here before. But in 1875 Darwin published his treatise on Insectivorous Plants, and that changed the way that plants were regarded. Honest!
Before Darwin and his theories of evolution everyone assumed the differences between humans, animals and plants was fixed and immutable. There was a clear hierarchy. Humans were at the top, and ruled over the animal kingdom, while plants were at the bottom of the pecking order, eaten and used by both animals and humans. When Darwin suggested that humans and monkeys might have shared a common ancestor he shocked many, and was satirised mercilessly for challenging that established order.
However what most of us probably don’t know is that Darwin had also investigated the physical structure of plants, and how they functioned.
from Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants
He began his research on carnivorous plants in the summer of 1860 admitting that he had been “surprised by finding how large a number of insects were caught by the leaves of the common sun-dew (Drosera rotundifolia)… I had heard that insects were thus caught, but knew nothing further on the subject.”
Over the next ten years or more he carried experiments which showed that the sundew captured not only small things such as flies but sometimes larger ones like butterflies and dragonflies. He already knew that “many plants cause the death of insects, for instance the sticky buds of the horse-chestnut without thereby receiving any advantage; but it was soon evident that Drosera was excellently adapted for the special purpose of catching insects.”
He discovered that its sticky parts had “extraordinary sensitiveness” to even the slightest pressure and this made its “hairs or tentacles” move. Even stranger the leaves were capable of “digesting nitrogenous substances” and “afterwards absorbing them.” He reasoned that these characteristics were part of the process of natural selection and that therefore the sundew, and other plants, “without any specialised nervous system” could evolve further because “we have no grounds for assuming that other tissues could not be rendered as exquisitely susceptible … if this were beneficial to the organism, as is the nervous system of the higher animals”
When he published his findings he drew the attention of the wider community to what must have seemed to them equally shocking implications. Even the great botanist Carl Linnaeus had earlier dismissed the idea that a plant could eat insects as being “against the order of nature as willed by God.” After such a put-down there was no further research for about a hundred years, until Darwin risked his neck.
By describing carnivorous plants – ie plants that reversed the “natural” order and ate insects or even small animals – Darwin opened the door to the possibility that plants had the ability, given enough time, to evolve and become more like animals. That was terrifying because it meant that far enough back, mankind might have shared a common ancestor with not only monkeys, or even the whole animal kingdom but perhaps potentially with plants too.
The implications that perhaps one’s ancestor many generations further back was a vegetable or even algae were even more shocking and altered everything. If plants could eat insects and maybe could evolve to eat animals then perhaps they could go one step further and evolve to threaten humans as well. No wonder literary imaginations began to run riot. especially given the fact that there are plenty of carnivorous plants in the world. They exist in at least a dozen plant families, covering over 600 species ranging from the well-known Venus fly-trap which has pairs of jaw-like leaves that it clamps together rapidly when prey lands, to the pitcher plants of the world’s tropical rain forests which catch them in liquid-filled receptacles, or the aquatic bladderworts which trap their victims with suction.
[I don’t have space to go into much more about the evolution of carnivorous plants but there is a good, well referenced, Wikipedia article which is worth looking at if you want to know more.]
It wasn’t long before Darwin’s theories about carnivorous plants and their evolution produced some fascinating responses, with the first report of a man eating tree appearing in an anonymous article in the New York World in April 1874. As was so often the case before copyright laws the magazine had “borrowed” the story from elsewhere: in this case Graefe and Walther’s Magazine, published in Germany. It takes the form of a letter from a German botanist Karl Leche to a Dr. Omelius Friedlowski, “a researcher of vegetable physiology”. It was put into print because Leche thought Darwin was almost ready to announce his own accounts of carnivorous plants, and he wanted to get in first because of his discovery of a giant tentacled plant in the jungles of Madagascar.
You might be wondering what a German botanist was doing in Madagascar. Was it his interest in its unique ecology or because it was “unexplored” territory botanically? Maybe, but at least equally importantly, this was the time of the great Scramble for Africa. As a result the island was becoming of great interest to the European colonial powers, especially Britain, France and Germany, although in the end it was the French who ended up intervening and taking over the country in the 1880s.
Leche had travelled to Madagascar and encountered the Mkodi “a very primitive race” who have “no religion beyond that of the awful reverence which they pay to the sacred tree.” He persuades them to take him to see it in “the heart of the forbidding and seemingly impenetrable forest.” There “the stalks of the tall trees rose like columns, the vines hanging down from them in festoons, and their roots running over the ground in every direction, making walking difficult.” The Mkodi carried javelins in case they encountered cheetahs or fierce buffalo when suddenly they “began to cry, Tepe! Tepe! and …in a bare spot … was the most singular of trees.”
Leche asked his reader to “imagine a pineapple eight feet high, and thick in proportion, resting upon its base and denuded of leaves, [it] was not the colour of an anana, but a dark, dingy brown, and apparently hard as iron. From the apex of this truncated cone eight leaves hung sheer to the ground, like doors swung back on their hinges. These leaves… were about eleven or twelve feet long and shaped very much like the leaves of the American agave, or century plant. They were two feet through in their thickest part and three feet wide, tapering to a sharp point that looked like a cow’s horn, …and thickly set with very strong thorny hooks…
the apex of the cone was a round, white, concave figure, like a smaller plate set within a larger one. This was not a flower but a receptacle, and there exuded into it a clear, treacly liquid, honey sweet, and possessed of violent intoxicating and soporific properties. From underneath the rim of the undermost plate a series of long, hairy, green tendrils stretched out in every direction towards the horizon. These were seven or eight feet long each, and tapered from four inches to a half an inch in diameter, yet they stretched out stiffly as iron rods. Above these six white, almost transparent, palpi reared themselves towards the sky, twirling and twisting with a marvellous incessant motion, yet constantly reaching upwards. Thin as reeds, and frail as quills, apparently they were yet five or six feet tall, and were so constantly and vigorously in motion, with such a subtle, sinuous, silent throbbing against the air, that they made me shudder in spite of myself with their suggestion of serpents flayed, yet dancing on their tails.”
A revised version with a white woman being devoured by the tree.
published by American Weekly, a newspaper supplement and reprinted in
Carnivorous plants and “the man eating tree” 1939
The Mkodi then “surrounded one of the women, and urged her with the points of their javelins” to climb up the rough stalk of the tree to drink the liquid. As she did so “the atrocious cannibal tree that had been so inert and dead came to sudden, savage life. The slender, delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence, fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then, while her awful screams, and yet more awful laughter, rose wilder to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgled moan, the tendrils, one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening, with the cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey.”
It was Leche said “the barbarity of the Laocoon without its beauty ” then “the great leaves rose slowly and stiffly, like the arms of a derrick, erected themselves in the air, approached one another, and closed about the dead and hampered victim with the silent force of a hydraulic press, and the ruthless purpose of a thumbscrew…. May I never see such a sight again!”
Leche said he saw six more specimens of this tree which he named “Crinoida, because when its leaves are in action it bears a striking resemblance to that well-known fossil the crinoid lilystone, or St. Cuthbert’s beads.”
Crinoids are an ancient and very common form of sea-plant, dating back at least 540 million years, which grew on stems attached to the seabed. Some of their modern descendants have evolved to be able to move by abandoning their stems and floating or “crawling” on the sea bed. Fossilised parts of crinoid stems were threaded to make necklaces or rosaries, and became known as St. Cuthbert’s beads in the Middle Ages.
Leche’s story was picked up and repeated in many places round the world. It even received a mention in William Robinson’s magazine The Garden in June 1874. However the strangest version formed the basis of an extraordinary account in a French magazine about contemporary political events in Madagascar.
The king of the island had been murdered, the murderer tried and told his life belonged to Tepe Tepe – the name Leche had used for the man-eating tree. He was then taken there and, using Leche’s words almost verbatim, fed to the tree. Even more extraordinary is that the reader was then told one of these trees had been sent to the Jardin d’acclimitization in Paris. [a replacement for the guillotine?]
Darwin himself heard about it courtesy of his American friend and colleague Asa Grey with whom he had been corresponding regularly, most recently about carnivorous plants. Gray sent him a copy of the article. Darwin replied saying – “I began reading the Madagascan squib quite gravely” when he spotted what no-one else had – and I’m sure that included you and me – “when I found it stated that Felis [cheetahs] & Bos [buffalos] inhabited Madagascar, I thought it was a false story”, although he “did not perceive it was a hoax till I came to the woman”.
And of course Darwin was right. The story of the Man Eating Plant of Madagascar is a complete fake from beginning to end. Karl Leche, Dr. Omelius Friedlowski, the Mkodi tribe and of course the tree itself did not exist and never had. Even the original source was faked because although, Graefe and Walther’s Magazine, existed it was actually a medical journal about surgery and ophthalmics and had ceased publication over 20 years earlier.
The truth for the rest of the world finally emerged in 1888 when the story was repeated yet again in a new magazine Current Literature. It named the author as Edmund Spencer and said he had written other stories for New York World “all being remarkable for their appearance of truth, the extraordinary imagination displayed, and for their somber tone” and comparing him with Edgar Allen Poe. It turns out that the the story was “the result of a talk with some friends, during which Mr. Spencer maintained that all that was necessary to produce a sensation of horror in the reader was to greatly exaggerate some well-known and perhaps beautiful thing. He then stated that he would show what could be done with the sensitive plant when this method of treatment was applied to it. The devil-tree is, after all, only a monstrous variety of the ‘Venus fly trap’ so common in North Carolina.”
While you might think that would be an end of it nothing gets in the way of a good hoax. Current Literature did not have a wide circulation and so its revelation did not really get out and the legend continued to be circulated, even in Madagascar itself as witnessed by an article in the “Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine” for 1881.
It inspired Frank Vincent, an American travel writer on a trip to Africa in the 1890s to visit Madagascar to make enquiries about it “for his own personal satisfaction”. Surprise surprise he couldn’t find it! Nevertheless his account led to another spurt of repeats of Leche’s story, usually as if it had only just happened. This continued right through into the 1920s when in 1924, 50 years after it was first reported, Leche’s account was given yet another boost of publicity by Chase Osborn, a former governor of Michigan, who published Madagascar, Land of the Man-Eating Tree in which he said he had met missionaries who had vouched for the tree’s existence. However it’s clear he used the story to get good publicity for his book: “I do not know whether this tigerish tree really exists or whether the bloodcurdling stories about it are pure myth. It is enough for my purpose if its story focuses your interest upon one of the least known spots of the world.”
As late as the early 1930s, expeditions were still being organized to try to find the elusive Crinoida Dajeeana. One was to be held by Captain de la Hurst, “a former Indian Army officer” who announced in 1932 that he was leading an expedition to the west coast of Madagascar in search of the man-eating tree. He was offering places to anyone who wanted to accompany him for a mere £525 each. “I can tell you this – it does eat human beings. It is kept a very close secret, and natives are not too keen on pointing out the locality. Chiefs have told me that sacrifices are offered to the tree, and I hope to take cinema pictures of the ceremony.”
Unfortunately there are no more reports of the good captain’s expedition anywhere obvious on the internet. That’s not surprising because on Christmas Eve I finally managed to track him down in John Bull, a London magazine, and discovered that he was actually a former soap powder salesman …. and almost certainly a conman.
Edmund Spencer’s belated April Fool’s joke continued to beguile and deceive people and his The man-eating tree of Madagascar seems to have been the progenitor of a whole literary dynasty of sinister plants and we’ll look at some of those in next week’s post.
For more on Carnivorous plants and their history a good place to start is The curious world of carnivorous plants : a comprehensive guide to their biology and cultivation [2007] or take a look at this version, one of many on YouTube [However be warned most of the the images come from another man-eating plant story which we’ll look at in another post soon.]
The Gardens Trust 
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