50 Astonishing Plants That Seem Straight Out Of Science Fiction

Douglas Justice is the associate director of the University of British Columbia’s botanical garden. He has agreed to lend his botanical expertise to us and share some of his favorite unusual plants.

Justice’s love for plants is immediately evident in the way he speaks about them: “I’ve come across many unusual and compelling plants in my years. It’s difficult for me to choose favorites (the lists are always expanding). I can usually find something that’s interesting in nearly all plants—the way some flowers, like poppies, for example, are unpacked from their buds."

"How they go, miraculously, from crinkled and bent to satiny smooth. I also like repeating patterns in plants: how for every hebe species (shrubby Veronica) there is another species slightly different in leaf size, shape, color or leaf angle, and another intermediate between the two.”

When asked what unusual flora he would recommend for growing at home, Douglas suggests leaf succulents and peperomias. They are easily grown and excellent windowsill subjects. “Speaking of peperomias,” Justice goes on, “on a magnolia expedition in Colombia some years ago I encountered a tree branch festooned with epiphytic peperomias so small they could fit into a thimble.

"I have no idea what their names are. A day or so later in Jardin Botanico de Bogota Jose Celestino Mutis, we came across the exquisite blue-flowered bromeliad known as the 'sapphire tower' (Puya alpestris) and the Venezuelan conifer Retrophyllum rospigliossii, a tree with fern-like branchlets so regular and perfect they look like they were churned out in a 3D printer.” Reading about these botanical adventures gives me an urge for some plant expeditions.

Douglas has one more suggestion for excitement-seeking plant parents. “A somewhat less tropical Andean plant I have grown (though repeatedly lost), is blue angel’s trumpets (Iochroma australe). This plant is a knockout. Its purple-blue pendulous trumpets would be a welcome addition in any garden.”

Justice then shares an adventure that suddenly makes me want to become the Short Round to his Indiana Jones. “[O]n a hillside in the Cocoro Valley (across from an expanse of Quindio wax palms) grew a huge red iochroma shrub (Iochroma gesnerioides), with ample clusters of hanging long-tubed flowers of a scarlet so intense it nearly burned the eyes.”