The Flower of One

Florence is an anti-social florist who seeks to grow self-sustaining flowers and thus eliminate the need for her coworkers. The biological difficulties are not easily surmounted. Initially customers don’t want self-sustaining flowers, because caring for the flowers is one of the therapeutic benefits of having them in the first place. Then no one will buy them, largely because they aren’t attractive. Once Florence succeeds, people become impressed by her and they are nicer to her so she wants them around more. But the flowers have grown to view her as a mother figure and will jealously defend her against the threat they perceive in the form of other people’s involvement with her.

Arborgeddon: Seed of Destruction

            Hundreds of saplings are tossed into a mass grave when a small town cancels its Arbor Day celebration in favor of an opening ceremony for a new car dealership.  A voodoo conservationist living in the nearby woods feels nature’s pain and makes her way to the grave site.  She prays for the trees and casts a curse over all those that stand in the way of nature.  She’s about to leave when she is shot by hunters who mistake her woodsy outfit as an animal’s pelt.  They toss the body into the tree grave and flee.

            That night, the trees crawl out of their grave and spread out into the woods.  The residents of the town find that trees have sealed across all of the roads into and out of the city.  Frustration turns to panic when blackened zombie trees begin tearing up asphalt, wrecking cars, and eventually killing those who try to break their limbs or saw them back.  The trees close the circle, taking over more and more of the town, until a last stand is made in a parking lot.

            Concrete is ripped up as a sapling grows even nearer to the last stand.  The car dealer rips the baby tree out of the ground and stomps on it, evoking a rage from the forest that then rips him apart.  Our hero, a high school botany teacher and his band of survivors, picks up the sapling and replants it.  Hesitantly the Macbeth-style tree army retreats.  Except their retreat is actually an outpouring towards neighboring towns and power-plants and refineries.

February the 14th: Rose from the Dead

            It’s the flower’s turn to pick you in this cross-pollination of The Ruins and Little Shop of Horrors.  An Orchid thief, a la Adaptation picks an alluring batch of rare roses from a secluded field, ignoring how insistently the thorns prick him.  He manages to make it all the way into town and sell the flowers to a local florist, before going home and suffering from horrific seizure-like attacks and then anaphylactic shock caused by the flowers growing out of his throat.  Meanwhile in the florist’s shop the rogue flower mingles and spreads its seeds amongst the other flowers.

            The next day is… of course… valentine’s day, and the florist is appalled when he sees that all of the flowers in his shop have transformed to look quite a bit more like the one from the day before.  He makes lemonade of the situation and manages to sell the exquisite flowers to many of his clients.  Deaths by flower begin occurring all over the city and police investigators trace the roots (chuckle chuckle) of the crime back to the flower shop, where they observe the florist, now sporting sunglasses and smashing all of the different, unaffected flowers in the front of the shop.

            The officers are drawn away from the shop for a few minutes to rescue a family trying to escape from an over-flowered apartment, and when they return, the florist is nowhere in sight.  Armed with weed-killer, the officers burst into the flower shop and fight their way to the back, where they find the florist, now a plant puppet with petal eyes, ready to defend his carnations incarnate to the death.