The catalog

Anomalies

Every specimen in the catalog is wrong in at least one way. These are the ways, as the Institute files them.

Temporal8 specimensPlants with a wrong relationship to time: flowering for dates that have not happened, or keeping hours of their own.
Bureaucratic8 specimensSpecimens that interact with paperwork: forms, stamps, registers and records that change around them.
Emotional response6 specimensPlants that respond to feeling — wilting at a lie, turning towards grief, refusing to grow for the unkind.
Numerical6 specimensPlants that count, round, tally or insist on a number, and are rarely wrong about it.
Unstable genome5 specimensGenomes that will not hold still. Two samples from the same leaf disagree, and the third disagrees with both.
Encoded message4 specimensSpecimens whose genomes, growth or arrangement carry a message: base-four text, ciphers in leaf order, instructions nobody asked for.
Acoustic4 specimensPlants bound up with sound: recording it, replaying it, swallowing it, or answering it.
Geometric4 specimensGrowth that obeys the wrong geometry: perfect angles, impossible spirals, shapes that do not close.
Linguistic4 specimensSpecimens entangled with language: names, grammar, translation, and words that change when they are near.
Meteorological4 specimensPlants that keep, call or answer the weather — rain on demand, private fogs, one cloud that follows.
Territorial4 specimensPlants concerned with borders, property and place — boundaries kept, crossed, redrawn or refused.
Mimicry3 specimensSpecimens that imitate what they should not: voices, handwriting, other plants, occasionally their keepers.