John Wyndham's lethal walking plant

Usage examples of triffid.

Even the science-fiction author, John Wyndham, found it necessary to endow his famous walking plants, the Triffids, with both a limited intelligence as well as some degree of communicative ability!

Only Mr Biderman's prick was huge, it looked like a kraken, a triffid, a monstah, and Bobby thought he understood the blood on his mother's legs.

He wrote The Day of the Triffids and The Krak en Wakes (both of which have been translated into several languages), The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as The Village of the Damned), The Seeds of Time, The Outward Urge (with Lucas Parkes), Trouble with Lichen, Consider Her Ways and Others and Chocky (1968), all of which have been published as Penguins.

Just to be on the safe side, I laid in several machine guns and mortars from the source which had already provided us with the flame throwers we used against the triffids.

The public learned that it and similar companies in other countries were about to farm triffids on a large scale, in order to extract valuable oils and juices and to press highly nutritious oil cake for stock feeding.

He would go on like that by the hour until listening to him would have me getting things out of proportion and I'd find myself thinking of the triffids as though they were some kind of competitor.

I can see there that within a week of my return from Tynsham I had started on the work of erecting a wire fence to keep the triffids out.

Yet another time a white flutter of movement on a distant hillside caught my eye, but when I turned the glasses on it I found it to be half a dozen sheep milling in panic while a triffid struck continually and ineffectively across their woolly backs.