Happy Monday, book pandas! 🐼 I’m excited to be back with another Fantasy with Friends post today. Also, I’m so sorry if parts of this don’t make sense or if I’m more rambly than usual. I’m fallen ill and the medicine just hit me as I started writing 🤣

What is Fantasy with Friends?

Fantasy with Friends is a discussion meme hosted by Briana and Krysta on Pages Unbound. Questions are posed every Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works. The yearly schedule is available on Pages Unbound so you can prepare way in advance! Don’t forget to leave a comment and link on the scheduled day so your post can be linked up. You can also tag @pagesunbound on Twitter and/or Bluesky!

Today’s Fantasy with Friends question:
What fantasy plants have stuck in your imagination? A plant with magical properties or a plant a character uses in a potion? What memorable ways does nature feature in fantasy?

While I’m pretty sure that I’ve read more than three books where fantasy plants feature prominently, as of writing this, all other titles have completely fled my head. Absolutely no one is surprised. 🤣 I guess you can say that there is one common reason why all of these fantasy plants have stuck in my imagination, but within the stories, they are also memorable for what they represent or for their plant ‘features’.

I’m not one of those readers who is always able to picture in great detail the fantasy worlds that I read about. I can to a degree, but again, it’s not crispy HD vision, and it doesn’t always happen for me. The commonality between all the books I’m mentioning is that I was able to vividly picture their settings because of the way the fantasy plants were written. They don’t always have magical properties but they are or have been influenced by magical and mythical elements.

My favourite aspect of Durst’s Spellshop Series is the lush and fantastical descriptions of the fantasy plants. The stories feature sentient and non-sentient plants, but both types add a lot to the whimsy and magic of the setting. I can’t recall reading many books with sentient plants before, and I loved Cal in book one of the series. In book two, The Enchanted Greenhouse, we not only get magical greenhouses with the oddest and most wondrous flora and fauna, there are also more sentient plants that had pretty quirky and (some even) adorable traits that made them stand out!

A little bit in contrast to the cute sentient plants, in books like The Jasmine Throne and The Tainted Cup, the plants are tied to otherworldly and magical entities, and these plants have an unsettling and eerie quality to them that adds to certain elements of each story. The religious faction in The Burning Kingdoms series centers on worshipping a nature/plant-based deity and honestly, some of the more body horror aspects related to the rotten growth of these plants was pretty nauseating—but clearly very memorable. 😅 The same goes for the plants in the Ana and Din Mysteries series that have been altered by the blood of the Leviathans. There are some pretty horrifying scenes and descriptions that oddly were grotesque and fascinating at the same. The way these plants have mutated were described so vividly and added so much to the setting, that its imprinted in my brain.

I think I really enjoy when fantasy plants add something or enhance a setting, but I also love when they serve a bigger purpose in the story.

What do you think of fantasy plants (do you think of them at all)? Have you read about any fantasy plants that have stuck with you?

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