1–24 of 36 specimens
Funeral Laughter
Calendula hilarans
A marigold that sprouts only at funerals and makes the mourners remember something funny about the dead.
Mending Ivy
Hedera reparans
A climbing ivy that slowly repairs whatever it grows over — cracked pots, torn paper, once a broken wrist.
Sleeper's Clover
Trifolium somniferum
A clover that closes its leaves at the exact moment anyone in the building falls asleep, and opens them for dreams that go well.
Correspondence Orchid
Dendrobium epistolare
An orchid whose petals carry faint handwriting — always a letter of thanks, never to anyone the gardener knows.
Quiet Crust
Lecanora liminis
A grey doorstep lichen from Mansourah that keeps a circle of perfect silence around itself, 2 mm wider every year.
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.
Height-Mark Sorghum
Sorghum bicolor
A Javanese sorghum whose stalks stop at the exact height of any child who stands beside them, and once stopped for the night watchman.
Extra Place Basil
Ocimum gratissimum
A fokontany-office basil from Toamasina adds one name to every list made beside it: a living person no register has ever recorded.
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.
Fog lily
Lilium caliginosum
On fog nights in the St. John's Narrows, skippers steered home by a widow walking Signal Hill, because every compass near her lily pointed at her.
Square-Account Palm
Washingtonia filifera
A fan palm from a Basque net-loft yard keeps the sky over the Palm House grey for as long as anyone beneath it owes money to anyone else.
Unheard-Hour Hortênsia
Hydrangea macrophylla
Walk the full 31 metres of this Penzance hydrangea hedge and no one can hear you for an hour, as a neighbour did at two in the morning in March 1971.
Freehold Glasswort
Sarcocornia quinqueflora
A Tasmanian saltmarsh glasswort gives the crabs and one wombat sheltering in it freehold title, stamped and registered in Hobart.
Company Mistletoe
Peraxilla tetrapetala
From 1967 to 1994 a Te Anau florist could see herself only with someone else in the mirror, so her neighbour came round every morning at 7.40.
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.
Widow's Fern
Polypodium memorans
An ordinary fern whose fronds uncurl only near the recently bereaved — and whose genome remembers who was lost.
Lamplighter's Moss
Bryum vesperale
A cushion moss that photosynthesises from attention rather than light, and dies in rooms nobody visits.
Cartographer's Root
Daucus itinerans
A wild carrot whose taproot grows in the exact shape of the route to wherever its seed was collected.
Quorum Thistle
Cirsium consensus
A thistle colony that voted, measurably, on where to spread next, and was destroyed after its third vote.
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.
Bonded Thyme
Thymus pannonicus
A creeping thyme seized at the Serbian border weighs 31 grams to its owner and cannot be moved by anyone else until the paperwork is signed.
Stranger's Cactus
Echinopsis peregrina
In 1933 a Hoyvík woman asked a court to declare her husband an impostor, though the harbour clerk, the town and his wage book all disagreed.
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.