THE OMINOUS FLORA OF OZ
by Robert B. Luehrs
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 21, no. 2 (Autumn 1977), pgs. 25–29
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Luehrs, Robert B. “The Ominous Flora of Oz.” Baum Bugle 21, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 25–29.
MLA 9th ed.:
Luehrs, Robert B. “The Ominous Flora of Oz.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 21, no. 2, 1977, pp. 25–29.
In L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz, most of the Ozians are farmers, and country living is endorsed by such notable individuals as the Scarecrow (the wisest being in the realm), the Shaggy Man (a veritable personification of freedom), and the Tin Woodman (who is guided by the best emotions). City life has produced civilization, and both are frequently chided in Baum’s stories for their artificiality, pretense, and downright chicanery. King Dox of Foxville in The Road to Oz glories in civilization precisely because it means haughtiness, social climbing, posturing, and vying with one’s neighbors in the art of show; when the Shaggy Man demurs, King Dox pointedly suggests that he must not be civilized. The only city of any size in Oz originated from a deception, however much Ozma later managed to erase this stigma. Oz eschews large-scale agricultural enterprise in favor of the small family farm that, although economically limited, functions to preserve rural virtues. All these points are obvious.
What is not so evident is the ambivalence towards Nature that runs through Baum’s books. Even if they do not claim to reject the artifices of civilization, the Oz folk are not in necessary harmony with their natural environment. Nature in Oz is not always trustworthy when left to its own devices; it can be a most menacing, destructive force. This equivocal attitude comes through repeatedly in Baum’s discussions of Ozian flora, the symbol of the world of Nature.[1] Undeniably, the beneficent aspects of vegetation are most visible: the manicured shrubbery and dazzling coloration of the flowers, Jinjur’s cream-puff bushes, the clock and bun groves of Oogaboo, the animal cracker and bicycle trees of Mo. Yet, alongside such products of cultivation, and perhaps more impressive, are the wild plans such as the soporific poppies of The Wizard of Oz that lure the unwary to destruction. Not even domestication is a guarantee of good behavior from plants. Jo Files’s book trees in Tik-Tok of Oz fill him with absurd illusions concerning the glory to be gained in modern war, and when Ugu the Shoemaker in The Lost Princess of Oz attempts to eliminate Ozma, he imprisons her in a luscious peach hidden in the midst of a splendid orchard of fruit trees.
Like the Tin Woodman, whom he resembled in several ways, Baum was fond of flowers and gardening, but he had great insight into the extent to which the vegetable kingdom is essentially alien and potentially harmful to the aspirations of man. Plants are not inevitably benevolent in Oz or anywhere else, and concerted effort is generally required to make them so. In this respect they mirror Nature itself, for “natural” is hardly equivalent to “good” save in the clouded nostalgia of the overly civilized idealists and of certain advertising agencies. Perhaps Baum’s recognition of this truth stemmed, in part, from his contact with the realities of the midwestern agricultural environment during the hard times of his Dakota days. The literati might rhapsodize about the noble husbandman and his enviable unity with the land or elaborate upon Jefferson’s famous statement that the tillers of the soil are God’s chosen people, but midwestern farmers of that era would be more likely to describe themselves as adversaries of their crops. Nature’s enmity to them must have appeared deliberate, and survival was purchased only through hardship, privation, and crushing labor. Such a tenuous endeavor held precious little romance.
Thus Oz is pastoral but not primitive. It does not teach the lesson that the only escape from the ills of civilization is through dissolving organized society and returning to the State of Nature, the unspoiled wilderness where all is spontaneous, pure, simple. The Wilderness, as traditionally depicted in American thought, is hardly appealing. One might have adventures or test one’s mettle there, but the wilderness is raw and barbarous, often violently beyond control, a malign habitat for dangerous mysterious beings. In the first Oz book, the Cowardly Lion must win his crown by killing the spidery monster who terrorizes the forest beasts, but in Baum’s last Oz book a spider is monarch in the wilderness once more, insolently defying Ozma’s magic. In Rinkitink in Oz the forest of Regos is the home of Choggenmugger, a monster so ferocious he has eaten all of the dragons and crocodiles of that island. The aboriginal Mifkets of John Dough and the Cherub wear leaves, live in plants, brandish clubs, and respect only brute strength; they are, in fact, Baum’s equivalent of the semihuman wild men of medieval legend. They are definitely not noble savages. Even the splendid Metal Forest of the Nome King in Tik-Tok of Oz, resplendent in its golden trees and silver bushes, acts chiefly as an elegant prison (for the Shaggy Man’s brother) wickedly rendered unsuitable for human society by Ruggedo’s enchantment.
Oz, then, occupies a middle ground between Nature and civilization and it is a good deal closer to civilization than to Nature. It is a cultivated garden in which Nature is improved in the sense of being domesticated and compelled to serve human purposes. Without this taming of the wilderness, Oz would be a most unpleasant fairyland indeed. No wonder, then, that unconstrained, untamed vegetation, the representative of the actual state of Nature, can be most dangerous to the Ozians. Violin bushes and bread trees are found where people can tend them, but not in the wild. Dr. Pipt’s garden in The Patchwork Girl of Oz abounds in blue edibles, while the forest beyond is “grim.”
So are some of the botanical specimens that lurk in the wilds. The fighting trees that for some reason protect the forest growing before the China Country in The Wizard of Oz impede travelers by seizing them in their branches and hurling them aside. These mysterious sentinels are like the holy trees of the Ancients, although no harm comes to the Tin Woodman for desecrating them with his axe; being used to the ways of the forest, he perhaps would know best how to handle them. In The Emerald City of Oz Baum listed the fighting trees among the more disagreeable aspects of Oz, suggesting they were worse than the cruel Kalidahs. The realm of the Mangaboos, themselves plants, holds man-eating Twining Vines (also called Clinging Vines) that devour intruders for nourishment, crushing them in serpentine tendrils. Similarly, the Yellow Brick Road taken by Ojo, Scraps, the Glass Cat, and the Woozy is menaced by variegated plants that swoop up the unwary and absorb them in the leaves. Only the fortunate arrival of the Shaggy Man rescues the party from this fate. His whistling cause the foliage to unroll, releasing the captives, for, as Shakespeare pointed out in The Tempest, music has the power to overcome the primitive fury of Nature.
Attractiveness of a plant is no guarantee that its relationship to people is salutary. The beautiful Magic Flower in The Magic of Oz lured people to a deserted island in the wilderness by producing a variety of blossoms and fruits, each crop rapidly succeeding the other in kaleidoscopic fashion. Once the victims reached the island they sprouted roots and, instead of growing, dwindled away into nothing. When Cap’n Bill recognized that the fatal magic spell was intended to work only on men and animals, he was able, by tying a piece of bark to his one “meat” foot, to remove the Magic Flower from its location and present it to Ozma. The tempting lavender berries on Pessim’s island in The Scarecrow of Oz reduce whoever eats one to the size of man’s thumb, just big enough to be a tasty snack for toads or birds. Fortunately, a dark purple berry acts as an antidote. Equally enticing is the fragrant, peach-like dama that grows in the handsome Valley of Voe in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. The significance, if any, of the name of the dama is difficult to determine,[2] but the most salient fact about the fruit is that it renders invisible all those who consume it, including the fierce bears who roam the countryside, catching and devouring the inhabitants. The existence of the unseen beasts takes a good measure of the charm out of life in Voe; the children of that community were even frightened by Dorothy’s kitten, who reminded them of the bears. Once again Nature injected anxiety into a potential paradise.
Sometimes the peculiarities of society itself account for the danger of plants to the Ozians. Plucking a six-leaf clover causes the arrest of Ojo the Unlucky in The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Ozma had forbidden picking this plant to discourage free-lance witches and magicians from using it for their evil spells and charms, and Ojo’s willful disregard of this injunction is a serious offense. In the end, he earned a royal pardon after admitting the wisdom of the law and displaying requisite contrition for his transgression. Two other examples of stern legislation of this sort come to mind. Under the Scarecrow’s regime in the Emerald City, the penalty for cutting leaves from the royal palm tree was seven executions followed by life imprisonment. But there appears to be no particular reason for such grave measures. In Ozma of Oz, the Wheelers threatened to kill Dorothy for picking a lunch-box and a dinner-pail from the trees without permission. However, since the trees belong to the royal family of Ev and not to the Wheelers, it would seem that this punishment was strictly arbitrary and, as it turned out, unenforceable.
If these instances of the baleful character of Ozian flora are not enough to give pause, it should be pointed out that all through The Emerald City of Oz, General Guph, outspoken foe of all people who are virtuous, prosperous, and contented, is shown with a flower growing from the top of his head. The Nomes, of course, are not vegetal, but the more advanced species of Ozian plant life do manage to create their own brands of civilization, with results most sinister by human standards. Baum explored two such communities (the land of the Mangaboos and the Rose Kingdom) in his works, and in the suppressed “Garden of Meats” chapter of The Patchwork Girl of Oz[3] he offers tantalizing hints about a third vegetable realm. None of these nations can offer many pleasant thoughts to creatures of flesh and blood.
The longest single episode in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, that chronicle of subterranean nightmares, is the encounter by Dorothy and her friends with the pernicious Mangaboos, humanoid vegetables as beautiful and unemotional as china dolls. The Mangaboos appear to be the Ozian equivalent of the Mandrake, a member of the nightshade family. No genuine witch in antiquity or the middle ages could afford to be without this essential ingredient for so many magic spells, even though it could be most deadly if improperly handled. The mandrake root resembles a human being, and the more acute herbalists even distinguish the male mandrake from the female womandrake. The identity between Mangaboos and mandrakes is by no means exact, but the similarities are certainly remarkable.
The Mangaboo greenhouse dwellings are illuminated by six colored lights, one in the center and the other five arranged in the form of a pentagon, a powerful sign for conjuring. In Neill’s illustrations, the same symbol appears on the brow of the ruler. The Sorcerer occupies an important position among them. He alone of the Mangaboos has a name, Gwig, and lives in a magnificent palace where all, even the Prince, must come if they want advice. One of Gwig’s functions is prophesying; medieval mandrakes were highly prized as oracles. He is not a very able prophet, and his bald head puts him in somewhat the same league as his opponent, the Wizard of Oz. Michael Patrick Hearn has proposed that power in a magician is dependent on having a good head of hair.[4] Thus a bald wizard is no wizard at all, and Gwig is justified in chiding the Wizard of Oz for not being able to pronounce “Mangaboo” properly, for a true practitioner of magic would be most familiar with these people. Mandrakes normally had both beards and long hair on their “heads.” Nevertheless, Gwig displays a fine magical aptitude in producing fairy bells and gradually constricting the Wizard’s ability to breathe, two effects never before included in the mandrake’s repertoire; normally the plant restricts its activities to inducing sleep, killing pain, expelling demons, acting as an aphrodisiac, and, if administered in too heavy a dose, producing insanity. The Wizard’s decision to combat Gwig by slicing him in half with a sword was quite in order, for an ancient method of harvesting mandrakes in such a way as to nullify their evil powers was to dig them up with a sword after certain precautions were taken. The Mangaboos enjoy but brief lives anyway, after which they are planted so that they can “give birth to other people,” as the Prince so ruefully put it. The mandrake also was deemed an effective drug against infertility in women.
Both the Mangaboo Prince and his successor, the Princess picked by Dorothy and her companions in the vain hope she might be more accommodating than the Prince, want to destroy the travelers. The Wizard manages to dissuade the Mangaboos from harming the humans by a spectacular display of the ability of ignited kerosene to parboil vegetables, but their enmity toward Jim the cab-hose, Dorothy’s kitten, and the nine piglets is implacable. Perhaps the reason the Mangaboos could not tolerate the animals can be found in the most famous method of safely uprooting a mandrake—having a dog pull it up. This method allows one to withdraw far enough away that the shriek the plant emits upon being extracted from the soil, fatal to all within earshot, cannot be heard. Possibly the Mangaboos, who because of their sheltered existence could not be expected to distinguish a dog from any other four-footed beast, merely wanted to avoid taking chances and so drove all the animals into the dreaded Black Hole. Besides, as agents of the wilderness, the Mangaboos would be expected to reject domesticated creatures.
There are differences between Mangaboos and mandrakes. The Mangaboos grow on bushes rather than underground and lose efficacy after a few years. Also, unlike their cousins on this side of the Deadly Desert, only some Mangaboos have occult powers. Even so, the family resemblance is considerable.
The encounter by Betsy, Hank the Mule, and the Shaggy Man with the Rose Kingdom in Tik-Tok of Oz might serve to illustrate the untrustworthiness even of plants that have long been part of the province of man (for roses are mentioned by Homer) when they are permitted to have the upper hand. The Royal Gardener, who might be expected to represent the interests of humanity, has gone native and enforces the roses’ law that calls for death to all intruders. Roses historically have been associated with death; since Roman times they have been strewn or planted on graves or carved on tombstones. But to one with a Victorian upbringing, roses would be more likely to symbolize love, for they are the special flowers of Venus, the Roman goddess of love. Thus it was most ironical that the roses should be so unresponsive to the Shaggy Man’s love magnet; as the Gardener points out, “Their stems have thorns, but no hearts.” The Rose Princess becomes mortal upon leaving her erstwhile kingdom and so can form an attachment to Private Files. To complete their infamy, the roses refuse to accept the Rose Princess picked by Betsy. They demand a male ruler, an unusual stipulation in a fairyland where the best rulers are female. The Gardener, who acts as regent, is dominated by the roses, each of which has a lovely girl’s face in its center. Roses appear in villainous roles in other Oz books, too. Gwig is described as having thorns “like those found on the branches of rose-bushes” on his head and hands. Mombi, in The Land of Oz, transforms herself into a red rose and is picked by the Tin Woodman for his buttonhole. Throughout the story of Oz, the reputation of roses is a tarnished one.
We know nothing more about the third plant kingdom, the Garden of Meats, beyond what is contained in an exchange of letters between Baum and F. K. Reilly on the unsuitability of this chapter for publication and what is contained in Neill’s drawings, which suggest the existence of a race of vegetables who grow people for unknown, but easily guessed, purposes. Here, it would seem, was the ultimate revenge for the mounds of cooked carrots and spinach children are coaxed into eating, the ultimate outcome of the grim struggle between the world of man and the world of Nature.
The concept of conscious, animate vegetation, not necessarily friendly to humanity, goes back to some of the primal religious beliefs of western man. According to Jean Piaget, children until the age of six or seven usually conceive that all things are endowed with will and are conscious or can possess a degree of consciousness. The idea of talking plants has also been a recurrent one in fantasy literature. In Canto XIII of Inferno, Dante converses with trees containing the souls of suicides. The seventeenth-century author, Cyrano de Bergerac, in Voyage to the Sun, described a forest of philosophic oaks who chatted with him in Greek about the amorous properties of apples, drawing their examples from Ovid. If the trees were correct in their evaluation, it is fitting that in Oz the possessor of the love magnet should also be fond of that fruit.
More closely related to Baum’s vegetable kingdom is the garden of talking flowers that Lewis Carroll included in Through the Looking Glass; these specimens are quarrelsome but not threatening. Carroll was evidently parodying the eloquent blossoms in Tennyson’s poem Maud. He was also drawing inspiration from his remarkable forerunner, the artist Jean-Ignace-Isadore Grandville, who so masterfully satirized French society and government during the unpopular regime of King Louis-Philippe (1830–48). Grandville specialized in anthropomorphic animals, bizarre hybrid creatures, and fantasy landscapes, all of which have endeared his work to twentieth-century surrealists. His drawings appeared in numerous Paris humor magazines and in a variety of children’s books. Of particularly significance is his book Another World, issued in thirty-six installments in 1844. The text describes the weird adventures of three mountebanks who explore the universe. One of them overhears a conspiracy among the vegetables to rebel against mankind, but, in the end, internal dissension nips the plot in the bud. The accompanying drawings show the vegetables with human faces and limbs fashioned from roots, leaves and tendrils. A wild thistle harangues a group of uncomprehending gherkins on revolutionary theory. A sugar cane in a planter’s hat and a sugar beet (described as “two refined gentlemen,” a pun worthy of Baum himself) engage in a violent quarrel while two tobacco plants, one taking snuff and the other dragging on a pipe, watch nonchalantly in the background. In a later episode in the book, a loveless perennial commits suicide by uprooting itself. Grandville’s illustrations for this story show a floral ball at the hothouse and the procession of the rose queen; again, all the flowers have human faces. His posthumous Animated Flowers (1847) elaborates on these themes and includes pictures of a blue-stocking rose who foists housework off on her husband so she can entertain young male intellectuals, and of the rose queen receiving homage from aphids.
John Tenniel, Carroll’s illustrator, was undoubtedly familiar with Grandville’s inventions. There is no evidence that Neill was, although there is a striking similarity between the vegetable farmers in the Garden of Mears and the vegetable rebels of Another World as well as in the two artists’ conceptions of flowers with women’s faces. Baum employed the latter motif not only in the Rose Kingdom roses but also in the sunflowers conjured up by Mombi to impede the progress of the counterrevolutionaries in The Land of Oz. The original stage version of The Wizard of Oz featured a chorus of attractive girls dressed as poppies.
Neither Grandville nor Carroll manifests the sort of suspicion toward vegetation that Baum does. Even among the advisors of Ozma the plant world is woefully underrepresented. It is quite debatable whether the Scarecrow can be counted as a vegetable. He does not derive his essence form his straw stuffing, for he can survive and function when stuffed with hay, money, or nothing at all. The character of Scraps likewise is not determined by her cotton interior. The Sawhorse, it is true, is wood, although his “horsiness” seems more significant. When in The Lost Princess of Oz he declares his superiority to flesh-and-blood animals and argues that wooden is beautiful, he neglects to mention the ugly, sinister Gargoyles, those eerily silent, wooden inhabitants of Naught. Throughout the Royal Historian’s accounts, the Sawhourse’s prime function is that of a steed, not that of a counselor. Simpleminded Jack Pumpkinhead is the closest to a true vegetable among the close associates of Ozma. He secures his intelligence from the pumpkin seeds within his jack-o-lantern pate, but only he among the notable citizens of Oz is in periodic danger of extinction as his head maliciously decays, requiring a replacement. His survival is threatened by his nature, an extraordinary condition. Even Jack is really a hybrid, a manufactured being with a rickety wooden body and a life artificially bestowed. Not until after Baum, with Ruth Plumly Thompson’s The Hungry Tiger of Oz, do we at last encounter a major, unadulterated vegetable character in Oz who engages our sympathies: Carter Green—and he began life as a mundane Winkie, suffering a transformation because of overindulgence in salad. The best Baum can offer in this line is the unexciting Prize Potato from the Centerville Fair in John Dough and the Cherub, who briefly exchanges barbs with the Failings.
The pastoral society of Oz rejects only the excesses of civilization and, in its relationship with the vegetable world, it betrays its deep suspicion of the truly natural life. Baum’s judgment on the entire problem can be readily discerned in Dorothy’s meeting with the Rabbit King of Bunnybury in The Emerald City of Oz. The King wants Dorothy to intercede with Glinda so that he can resign the burdens of his office, abandon the restrictions placed on his behavior by his responsibilities to his fellows, and return to the wilderness where he might recover his nature and his freedom. In time he comes to understand that renunciation of his wild state has led to safety from predators, the pleasures of leisure and luxury in organized society, and the delights of civilized love. As Dorothy puts it, “You’d be a reg’lar lunatic to want to leave Bunnybury for a wild life in the forest, and I’m sure any rabbit outside the city would be glad to take your place.” On reflection, the Rabbit King can only agree: he is in clover. Thus Baum has returned to one of the oldest themes in literature and has provided quite a traditional answer to the nagging question of whether civilization is worth all of the trouble.
[1] Barbara Koelle, “Oz and Middle Earth,” Baum Bugle 15, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 17.
[2] Jerry V. Tobias, “Footnotes to Oz: Oz Etymology,” Baum Bugle 16, no. 3 (Christmas 1972): 16.
[3] Dick Martin, “’The Garden of Meats’: A Lost Episode of Ozian History,” Baum Bugle 10, no. 3 (Christmas 1966): 5–8.
[4] Michael Patrick Hearn, ed., The Annotated Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973), 263, note 2.
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