The U.K.’s Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley is harboring a dangerous plant known as Puya chilensis, a South American monster with a 10-foot flower stalk and razor-sharp spines that it uses to trap and consume sheep. It looks like this:
Wait, no. It looks like this:
I am 100 percent not kidding about the sheep, though. That’s straight from the BB goddamn C:
In the Andes it uses its sharp spines to snare and trap sheep and other animals, which slowly starve to death.
The animals then decay at the base of the plant, acting as a fertiliser.
The RHS’s Puya chilensis, which gets fed liquid fertilizer rather than deliquesced mutton, is set to bloom soon for the first time since it was planted 15 years ago. Apparently, when you don’t satiate their bloodlust, it’s pretty hard to convince these guys to flower. But horticulturists who are definitely humans and NOT plants in disguise assure us that the spines are “well out of reach of both children and sheep alike,” so this would be a wonderful and perfectly safe time to visit.
