SOURCE: Price, Laurence. “Messrs Wells and Conan Doyle—Purveyors of Horticultural curiosities and Proto-Triffids.” The Wellsian, no. 21 (winter 1998): 35-44.

In the following essay, Price compares Wells's “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” and Arthur Conan Doyle's “The American's Tale” and dubs these stories “precursors of the deadly plant themes that have fed many of our twentieth century fears and phobias.”

Long before the publication of The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham in 1951, two eminent authors had developed the theme of man-killing plants, although on a less apocalyptic scale, in short stories written towards the end of the nineteenth century. The first was Arthur Conan Doyle with “The American's Tale” published in the Christmas number of London Society in 1880, the second, H. G. Wells with “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” which appeared in the Pall Mall Budget on 2^nd August 1894.

Of the two, “The Flowering of...