A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ by H. G. Wells

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Little Shop of Horrors , the story is an unsettling tale about a parasitical species of plant which feeds upon the blood of a man who collects orchids. Perhaps a brief plot summary would be a wise place to begin. Summary ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ is about Winter-Wedderburn, a shy, lonely, and rather feeble man who collects orchids. One day, he announces to his housekeeper that he has a feeling something is going to happen to him on that day. This is unusual, because normally nothing ever happens to him. He tells his housekeeper (who is also his cousin) about a fellow orchid-collector who led an exciting life and was killed by jungle-leeches (at least, so Wedderburn supposes at this point in the story – the real cause of the man’s death will become apparent later on). He buys a strange and unidentified new species of orchid which he intends to study closely. When he doesn’t show up for the regular ritual of afternoon tea, his cousin grows worried. When she goes into the hothouse where the orchids are housed, she finds him lying face upwards on the ground at the foot of the strange new orchid. The plant has grown aerial rootlets which have fastened themselves around him, feeding parasitically on him like leeches. He has fainted from lack of blood. His cousin-cum-housekeeper rescues him from the hothouse and takes him off to bed, and the doctor comes to examine him. She and the doctor then go to inspect the hothouse, which is in disarray, with the flowers all shrivelling and dying. Wedderburn, however, is delighted and talkative because, finally, something exciting has happened to him. Analysis Before John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and before The Little Shop of Horrors , there was ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’: H. G. Wells’s take on the ‘deadly and destructive plant’ subgenre of science fiction. However, in keeping with the smaller confines of the short-story form, there is no societal collapse or long line of victims: instead Wells concentrates the […]

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