St. Remedius Medical College: "The Cure For Plant Blindness"

Plants Deserve Love, Too

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

The official term is “plant blindness”: “the inability of a person to notice plants and/or appreciate their significance.” For a significant proportion of the human population, plants are background: the trees, shrubs, vines, and other outgrowths that conceal the important things in the universe, namely us animals. Look at a diorama of a Carboniferous forest, and most viewers focus on the insects and amphibians, all the while being surrounded by examples of a nearly global floral explosion. Gardening and horticultural enthusiasts both complain, justifiably, that most visitors to garden centers and online seed catalogs only focus on what the plants can do for them: can it be eaten? Could I smoke it? Will it magically take care of my extensive bedbug and crab lice problem? If a particular plant isn’t economically valuable or if it doesn’t do tricks, then most people ignore it until it becomes a problem, whether that be it setting off contact dermatitis or flattening one’s house in a windstorm.

Combine this with the various exonormal factors affecting our world’s flora, and it’s easy to understand why the Botany department at St. Remedius Medical College never received the popular response afforded more linkbaity departments as Advanced Technologies or even Music. Internally, not only did Botany researchers work very closely and very productively with every other major department, but its teams regularly offered solutions and advice that save the lives of other teams, sometimes before they realized it. After all, the contact dermatitis could also set off a Thomsen reaction and leave a patient with functional and potentially debilitating chloroplasts, and a tree that falls atop a house once is much less dangerous than one that rights itself and walks to a better locale.

For its own purposes, the Botany department broke its researches into distinct areas: contemporary (flora living within 100 years of the present time), chronal (flora from either the distant past or future), quantum (flora native to and adapted to one or more quantum pockets), magical (plants with a minor or major metaphysical presence), and extradimensional (flora out of phase with our reality but still able to influence affairs). This became vital not just for categorization of research and its applications, but on crossover with other areas. For instance, Australian triggerplants (genus Stylidium) were confirmed in the early 21st Century to be carnivorous, mostly feeding upon fairy wasps, but also upon the equally microscopic fae known as “wasp fairies.” Further triggerplant study led not just to better understanding of the wasp fairy ecosphere and their place in it, but better ways to isolate experiments from metaphysical influence and interference. (This didn’t always lead to the best situations, as the panic in 2014 for “wasp fairy filtration systems” for organisms regularly inhaled by humans with about every tenth breath demonstrated. However, it did confirm that wasp fairies were a source of allergic reactions normally attributed to dust mites, and this was before the discovery of mite fairies.)

A similar expansion of research parameters, in this case relationships between plants and fungus, allowed groundbreaking research into parasitic relationships, such as with the “Whispie,” a parasitic botanofae related to dodder that infects dryads and their trees. This in turn led to developments in understanding the intense symbiotic relationships between mycorrhizal fungus and such diverse plants as orchids and conifers, exposing the wide communications net and sentient nodes spreading across continents and leading to the first iterations of the Toadstool fungal internet browser. (As opposed to the electronic internet, the fungal internet had extensive defenses against predation and parasitism, as Reddit regulars using the Toadstool browser discovered to their eternal regret.) Whenever you eat a telepathic truffle, thank a St. Remedius researcher for the taste sensation and the ability to share deepest thoughts with your grandparents, the tree that gave it physical and mental sustenance, and the deeper fungal web.

Complicating this, of course, was attempting to recreate the best conditions for unique flora, as many that were critically endangered in their particular time or quantum pocket had the potential to become invasive if introduced elsewhere. The study of medicinal plants was especially involved, as growing one species with a potential for annihilating lymphatic cancer in the late Adaptocene Period 40 million years in the future might only yield treatments that exacerbated Dunning-Kruger Syndrome in the present.

To that end, St. Remedius at its height had extensive research and extension centers, designed in close conjunction with Texas A&M University, in diverse locales throughout space and time, all doing their best to take advantage of singular growing conditions and relative isolation. Some of these research and extension centers were privatized after the disappearance of the Medical College, particularly by independent research institutes, but the status of many others remain unknown.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

botanofae Botany Department St. Remedius wasp fairies