There's a good reason that Batman uses bat imagery to strike terror into the hearts of Gotham's criminals, rather than, say, some kind of shrew. Bats are freakin' scary. For the same reason, nature has decided to use that same mold to make plants that can induce spontaneous bowel movements, with the addition of some tentacles just to be sure, like we have on the Chinese black batflowers.
It is kept as an ornamental plant by gardeners who prefer to cultivate nightmares, and have the balls to live in the presence of a plant that looks like it crawled out of a Bosch painting and wants to plant its young in their head.
Their dangling fruit even looks like bats sleeping upside down, as pictured here ...
1180 Comments