It's been a long while since I last read it, but 'Monument' by Lloyd Biggle Jr had a couple of interesting ones in.

There was the semi-intelligent carnivorous 'tree' which looked pretty much like any of the other large flora, but dropped it's branches to form a net whenever an animal of about the right size walked under it. Can't remember exactly what it did next, but that wasn't important to the story. The planetary biochemistry was just sufficiently different that humans couldn't eat the local life, or vice versa. IIRC, humans were actually poisonous to these plants. Thing was, one of the characters, fresh off a ship wearing regular clothes was attacked by one of these which promptly let him go after a terrifying 30 seconds and went into spasms - he was left shocked and covered in scratches and small puncture wounds. Nobody had told him about them, because they didn't bother humans, but the locals were all dark-skinned and wore skimpy but brightly coloured cothing. The plant hadn't recognised him as human...

Later on, was the tale of the gravel paths. One of the newly installed offworlders, in trying to make things a little more 'civilised' had put down gravel paths between their buildings. None of the locals would walk on them. Everything was fine for a few days, until the people using them started getting burnt and blistered feet. Turned out one of the local fungi loved broken rock to live in and defended itself by producing a corrosive (may have helped it leach minerals from the rock?). On discovering that, they not only had to strip out the paths, but also clean all the floors this stuff had been tracked onto...

On 22/07/2016 19:35, Timothy Collinson wrote:

On 22 Jul 2016 14:20, "Jeffrey Schwartz" <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would _really_ like to see some plant articles.
>
> It's an area where I'm skimpy, and I'd really like to know more.
>
> Please, Timothy?

Well, I've not *quite* given up yet.   There is quite a good Wikipedia article on alien (science fiction) plants if folk need something quickly.  I was also inspired by a thing in White Dwarf on plants in Metamorphosis Alpha - though it tends to be a bit mushroom obsessed.

One of the difficulties is making sure they're interesting.  It's easy enough, as my encyclopedia shows, to have a million dull - if very pretty - things which for typical Traveller purposes would just be one line descriptive background at best.  I'm aiming at things which would be of interest to Travellers because they're:
- dangerous and need to be avoided
- valuable and need to be collected
- tricky to transport and need to be molly coddled
- subtly present difficulties which need to be known about (eg the hexipuffs in Three Blind Mice)

Actually,  those last are a good example of what I was after.  Something (moderately) interesting to describe, something not particularly dangerous but can cause problems and something that isn't necessarily encountered in the wilderness.  As it happens they were directly inspired by three librarian ladies I know on Twitter who were talking about knitting or crochet or something and used the word (was it in humour or are they real things?  I can't recall) and I immediately thought the word would be great for a creature/plant.  I credited them.

tc

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