Growing the Lanternwild: Planting the Flowers Behind a Fantasy World

There are probably easier ways to research imaginary flowers.

I could scroll through reference photos. I could read botanical descriptions, collect pictures into folders, sketch a few interesting shapes, and call it a day. For a fantasy world, technically, that would be enough. But somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to know what these plants were actually like.

Not just what a morning glory looks like when it is perfectly open for a photograph, but how the vine grows before it ever flowers. How it searches for something to climb. What the leaves look like when they first unfold. How quickly the entire plant can change. What happens when a seed coat refuses to come off, a seedling gets thirsty, or a vine decides that apparently the nearest available patch of empty air is a perfectly acceptable trellis.

So I planted them.

Research That Starts With a Seed

This particular experiment began with moonflowers and morning glories. Moonflowers have fascinated me for a long time anyway. They’re enormous white relatives of morning glories that open in the evening, which already sounds like something I would have invented for the Lanternwild if nature hadn’t beaten me to it.

Then there are my Heavenly Blue morning glories, with their almost impossibly blue flowers,

And another blue-and-white morning glory I chose because its dramatic coloring reminded me so much of the sort of flower I wanted growing in the Lanternwild.

That one became part of the inspiration behind Bogstar.

Bogstar isn’t meant to be a fantasy morning glory with the serial numbers filed off. That isn’t really how I like building plants. A real flower gives me a visual starting point, a shape, a growth habit, a color combination, and then I start asking questions.

What if it evolved somewhere wetter?

What would pollinate it?

Would Mousefolk use it for anything?

Does it behave differently at night?

Does it grow alone, or does finding one mean something about the land around it?

And suddenly a flower I found beautiful becomes a completely different organism with its own place in the world.

Photos Don’t Show You Everything

Growing the plants myself has already given me details I probably never would have thought about from photographs alone. For one thing, vines are ridiculous.

Once the morning glories started getting established, they began sending out these long exploratory stems that seemed determined to locate something… anything… to climb. One of them stretched so far away from its pot that I could hold the wandering end of the vine in my hand.

There is something very different about seeing that happen in real time versus reading the sentence “morning glories are climbing vines.”“Climbing vine” is information. Watching a living stem reach into open space and curve around looking for support is behavior.

That is the kind of thing I want to take back into my fictional plants.

Maybe a Lanternwild vine searches unusually far before attaching itself. Maybe it responds to lantern light. Maybe Mousefolk can tell which direction something lies by watching which way a particular plant reaches.

I don’t know yet.

That’s part of the point.

The Less Glamorous Side of Fantasy Research

Of course, I would love to pretend this process looks like an old naturalist quietly studying flowers by moonlight while filling an elegant field journal. In reality, a significant percentage of it has been:

Why is your seed coat still stuck to your head?

Why are you lying down?

Did you break yourself?!

PLEASE STOP BEING DRAMATIC.

One of my moonflower seedlings emerged wearing its thick seed coat like a tiny helmet. I learned very quickly that trying to “help” seedlings out of those can be a bad idea when I accidentally removed the leaves from a different seedling.

Some survived my intervention.

Some lessons were learned.

The moonflower later managed to bend and partially break its own stem, while one of the morning glories responded to being moved into its larger pot by collapsing dramatically across the soil. Plants, I have discovered, are excellent at making perfectly normal biological processes look like emergencies, and weirdly, even that is useful.

Fantasy plants shouldn’t only exist when they are beautifully blooming. They germinate. They struggle. They get damaged. They respond to weather. Their leaves age. Their vines have to find somewhere to go. Thinking about those less picturesque stages makes them feel much more like actual organisms and less like decorations placed around a fantasy landscape.

Drawing What I Notice

The other half of this experiment is drawing. I’ve always built the Lanternwild visually. Sometimes the image comes first and the explanation follows later. A flower shape becomes a species. A strange tree becomes a landmark. A patch of glowing water becomes a place on a map. A creature sketch becomes a legend.

Growing real plants gives me an endless supply of tiny things to notice and translate: the veins inside a leaf, the way two leaves emerge from the same stem, the shape of a new bud, the twist of a vine, the difference between young growth and older growth. I don’t necessarily want to copy any of those things exactly. I want to understand them well enough that I can change them convincingly.

If a fantasy flower glows, I still want to know where that glow might travel through the plant. If its vines move strangely, I want them to move like vines. If something grows in a bog, I want the rest of its structure to make sense for a wet environment. Magic can break the rules.

I just like knowing which rules I’m breaking first.

Letting the World Surprise Me

That may be my favorite part of growing these plants for research: I don’t actually know what information I’m going to get from them yet. Maybe the most useful observation will happen when the moonflowers finally bloom. Maybe it will be something about how the morning glories wrap around their trellises. Maybe one plant will do something completely ordinary that I have somehow never noticed before, and six months later that tiny observation will end up buried inside a paragraph of Legends of the Lanternwild.

That happens a lot when I build this world. The finished idea rarely arrives all at once. It starts with something small. A mouse. A flower. A sound. A map. A question.

Then I follow it.

For now, that means watering seedlings, untangling vines, taking too many reference photos, drawing leaves, and waiting to see what blooms.

Somewhere between the soil on my hands and the fictional bogs on my maps, the Lanternwild grows a little more real.