Funeral Laughter
Calendula hilarans
A marigold that sprouts only at funerals and makes the mourners remember something funny about the dead.
Grace Lily
Nymphaea moratoria
A Lapland water lily that, for the nine weeks it is in flower, stops every legal deadline in sight of its pond: tax, leases and evictions.
Tithe-Map Pitcher
Sarracenia purpurea
A purple pitcher plant whose tin chapel turned up in a 1790 vestry minute, just in time to beat a council demolition order.
Calicut Noon
Dioscorea meridiana
In a Leeds curry house, everything near this yam cast the shadow of the sun over Kozhikode, and the cook rang home by the salt cellar.
Fourth-Cone Mammillaria
Mammillaria griseiflora
A Kutaisi windowsill cactus flowers grey to every human eye and bright to every spectrometer, and one unclaimed exam answer names the colour.
Hollow Elm
Ulmus testamenta
An elm whose growth rings record the last words spoken near it each year — and which has started recording words that have not been spoken yet.
Shubin's Ribbon
Laminaria famae
A kelp found in Siberian larch forest in 1887, and an auctioneer who acquired a limp the same week he wrote to deny it.
Maker's-Hour Liverwort
Conocephalum horarium
A Hardanger liverwort pulls every nearby clock to the local time of the town that made it, and a court once rebuilt a ship's galley from nine of them.