For those of you who have or are creating a fantasy landscape that is mostly earth-like, do you only use familiar trees and plants, or make some up as you go along?

I'm a wildflower/garden/houseplant aficiando, and so there's nothing that drives me crazier than when a story A) puts flora in the wrong climate-zone or season, or B) makes up a name for something that isn't unusual enough to warrant a new name i.e, Robert Jordan's "leatherleaf" trees.

Since this is my first fantasy foray, I worry that readers might expect a few differences from the flora/fauna they're familiar with. This is a different world, after all, right?

To compound my things, my main character's life revolves around horticulture and so plants are more prominent than in some stories.

So -- do I just keep with the flora I know and love, or do I "pepper" it with plants that are exotic?

What really bothers me is when fantasy (or science fiction) authors transplant Earth species to a different world, without taking into account the differences. For example, George R. R. Martin has the seasons of his fantasy world lasting years at a time. Yet he has such things as apple trees, which in the real world require x number of frost hours each winter, but in his world they produce fruit with no problems. None of his plants or animals seem particularly adapted to living through years of summer followed by years of winter.

I think that those sorts of problems are more critical than deciding what to call the plants/animals. However, naming conventions can do a lot to establish the culture of the people who did the naming.

Mike -- Thanks so much! I just might take you up on that.

MCameron -- Yeah, that bothered me about Martin's stories, as well. As to naming: I think I'm going the Tolkien route of naming unknown species in the local language, but translating them into English, as well. (like athelas and "kingsfoil") I'll try to keep this to a minimum, though.

wbriggs -- I just came from a weekend in Georgia, so I know what you mean about kudzu!
(Even though it's a recent Japanese transplant -- heh)

This is not necessarily the entire story. The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan [ISBN 0-375-76039-3] details how the apple does not breed true. If you clone an apple tree variety requiring x number of frost hours each winter, then all clones will require the same conditions and fruit identically. Interestingly, each apple seed is uniquely aberrant, resulting in a quickly varied genetic drift. In effect, one tree's fruit results in thousands of seeds, each genetically unique and wildly divergent. Given a couple of generations, at least one of those seeds will thrive under new and widely variant conditions.

Makes one wonder what would happen if several million apple seeds were planted in low-G conditions with minimal oxygen and an entirely different mineral mix. What vain rulers might find a use for such a fruit?

[edited to correct a missing 't']

Now, deciding whether a term applies or not can be tricky. I don't know about "leatherleaf" trees, but Jordan also decided to call whisky "oosqui" or whatever and cotton "algode". The reason he did this is obvious, to paint them as being exotic relative to the already introduced milieu. The reason he choose a mangled but phonetic spelling for one and a Spanish word for the other eludes me, probably he decided that the mangled phonetic spelling would seem silly and he didn't want to portray the culture that used these "exotic" items as being Hispanic.

That he used the terms he did rather than coming up with entirely novel terms (in his invented language) is a reflection of a minor bit of laziness. He wanted us all to know that the items being described were cotton and whisky, but he didn't want to describe them precisely enough for us to figure that out on our own.

The point is that using the words "cotton" and "whisky" would have destroyed the sense that these things were exotic to the initial milieu and characters.

Of course, I think that his milieu building was full of plausibility holes. You only need to look at the map tucked in the beginning of each book to realize that. How much attention you want to pay to the plausibility of your invented world is up to you. I recommend that you get to the point where you're fairly confident that it holds together. If you're making a big deal out of the botany of your milieu, then probably you should make a solid effort there, because the kind of person that likes that sort of thing is more likely to spot errors.

Some things I want to convey a feeling, and I have tried to do it in a more subtle "sounds like" sense. The name is slightly different, hopefully enough different to keep up the appearances of an alternate world, but I'm hoping the echo of the original will come through. For instance, my milieau takes place in part, in a remote temple high in the snow-covered mountains, similiar to Tibet. My monks wear long woolen robes, and their leader is the Yama Do'chan. The similarity to the term "Dali Lama" was intentional, specifically because I was trying to make a very loose tie with a culture the reader might understand. I'm hoping it's still subtle enough that the connection will mostly be subconscious. No one has yet complained about this particular name. In some cases, with other names, I've not been as successful, and the critiques I've gotten have reflected that fact. Those are the ones I have to work on.

I guess, as with any other thing you write, the question to ask yourself is: is this relevant? If it's relevant to the plot and milieu to give it a "new" name, then go ahead. If it's done merely for effect, then you should probably drop it.

if you take the section of her novels where they discover the artificially intelligent computer that their ancestors brought with them, it had to take a few minutes to learn their language. even though the harpers tried to keep the language pure over the centuries, it eventually changed to meet their needs. so, despite their best efforts, every generation of people added something that changed the language.

names for stuff on different planets may also need to take the same steps. what might be called one thing on earth might not be suitable for the apparent equal on another planet. therefore, something new has to be devised to cover the required points of its nature. in the book Dragonsdawn, the settlers are afraid of what they are going to drink when they run out of their coffee supplies because the coffee plants don't survive on pern. somebody happens to take a chance and brew a drink from a native plant that tastes somewhat like coffee. so, when their descendants get up in the morning and drink klah, we think of it as coffee.

one more thing. when writing one book, it might be plausible to make mention of something that is comparable to what you have made up. i.e. horse = runnerbeast. but, if you are doing series work, it probably won't require an explanation since the reader will eventually relate what they are reading to stuff in their everday life.

I appreciate your comments, Fruguy, but they don't justify calling a horse a runnerbeast. When I first read about them, I had thought that runnerbeasts were something else entirely, and was willing to go along with that name for them--whatever kind of animal they were supposed to be that the characters were using instead of horses. It only became irritating to me when I found out that they were actually horses, and there was no reason given for the name change.

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Horses were improved somewhat by genetic tinkering. A number of genotypes coexisted and interbred for sixteen hundreds years, until the plague. During the plague, all of the remaining true horses died out, leaving only the "runnerbeasts."

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OK, so it sounds like a justification after the fact for the stupid name. I can see the geneticists insisting that the modified horses not be called horses, but it is still a pretty thin reason.

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Yeah, geneticists are always insisting on names like "runnerbeast" for their creations

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The flora of fantasy stories has always required a generous sprinkling of handwavium pellets. You often get plants indigenous to different continents written into the same scenes. Avoid knotting yourself up by trying to turn a fantasy world into a sci-fi one.

One of the mitigating things about fantasy is the idea that if the reader were somehow magically transported to your created realm and saw trees that looked like willows, even if they knew they were on another world, what would they call it other than a willow? Same with a beast that reminded them of a horse or a pig or a goat. They might call them a marsh-goat, or a rock-pig or an Evergreen Sea Willow but they would use familiar worlds.

Similarly the Papua Niu Gini pidjin english word for elephant is 'bloody-big-pig'.

In my work I am amazed by how confused and confusing common names can be. I find it amusing when in a story someone says, 'Go get some Black-eyed Susan for this potion,' and everyone knows what they mean.

The differences are especially noticeable if you move from one climatic zone to another. What YOU thought was a Silver Daisy is called a Horseman's Curse around here.

If your person is a dyed-in-the-wool naturalist they will probably struggle with it too and will probably try to 'classify' what they are looking at. How they do that will depend on how they understand the natural world AND what they consider remarkable.

Think about the changing methods of classification used by botanists and naturalists through the ages as their understanding of the natural world changed. From Theophrastus to Dioscorides to Ibn al Batar and other mediaeval Islamic scientists all the way through to Fuchs the main reason they wanted to classify plants was more to do with pharamacological interests or agricultural imperatives than purely scientific curiosity.

Some were more rigorous than others, some were empiricle in their approach and others relied on secondhand information (Pliny the Elder thought swifts hibernated under water during winter and, thanks to reliable reports, that there were dogheaded tribes in Africa that communicated by yapping.)

Later you get people like Molina, (a jesuit who advanced an early form of evolutionary theory) Plumier and Linnaeus and Darwin who start thinking 'this is a subject that is valuable in and of itself for the glory of God and/or the advancement of human knowledge.

We all see evidence in the natural world that supports our particular view of it. Not only that, but the way your character understands the natural world will be reflected in the way the categorise plants. Today we would think it ridiculous to even consider the potential magical properties of plants. But your character may believe that if a daisy can produce a certain magical effect and a pinecone produces the same effect they clearly belong in the same category.

So if we read in your story that 'Thunor sat on the riverbank and chewed Painstop Bark until his headache went.' Some of us might think, 'Oh okay, Painstop is a magic plant.' Some would think 'Oh okay, I wonder if Painstop is the local common name for Willow.' another may say 'Oh okay, Painstop must contain the chemical salicin.'

I would only worry about renaming something if it performed a specific function that at some point helps the story by being useful or if it gives us a cultural insight and is so different in appearance and function that there is no analogous plant on earth.

Hope this helps.

Your thoughts really reaffirmed how I want to approach this.

Thanks,

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Pliny the Elder thought...that there were dogheaded tribes in Africa that communicated by yapping.

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