When you think of the phrase “10 places plants,” you might picture gardens or forests, but the reality is far more dramatic. Across the globe, green life has surged back into spaces once dominated by humans, turning cities, resorts, islands and even a rusting ship into verdant showcases of nature’s persistence. Below we wander through each of these ten astonishing locations, where flora has reclaimed the stage.
10 Wangaratta
Most of the time, plants take over because humans have abandoned a particular space and stopped actively pushing the plants back. However, there is at least one time that the plants pushed first.
Wangaratta is a city in Northeast Victoria that exists mostly as a service center for the surrounding farmland. It is a well‑established community where people clearly maintain boundaries against plant overgrowth, and you rarely hear of plants attacking the township.
Nevertheless, one bright morning in 2016, residents awoke to a surreal sight: the town was buried under a massive tumbleweed known as “hairy panic.” The invasive plant smothered houses up to their roofs, hid cars completely, and turned streets into a sea of white fluff.
The council declined to intervene, citing that the tumbleweed posed no fire hazard. The blame fell on a single farmer who, despite drought and hard conditions, could not keep his land clear. The poor bloke probably spent that evening nursing a lonely pint at the local pub.
9 Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel
Kellerman’s, the resort visited by Baby and her family in the wonderful movie Dirty Dancing, was based on a real place called Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel, near Liberty, New York.
In the middle of the 20th century, a handful of these grand hotels dotted the Catskills, catering mainly to affluent Jewish New Yorkers who escaped the city heat on summer weekends. As air travel became cheaper and air‑conditioning more common, the allure of these woodland retreats faded.
Grossinger’s was once a glittering palace with ballrooms, swimming pools and a skating rink. Today, the same massive structure is draped in ferns, moss and climbing vines. Trees inch ever closer, turning the once‑opulent resort into a living museum of nature’s quiet takeover.
8 Houtouwan
There are a number of places on this little blue planet where the beauty of overgrown plants is a tourist draw. One such location is the little fishing village of Houtouwan, nestled into China’s Shengshan Island, one of the 400 tiny islands of the Shengsi archipelago.
Houtouwan becomes greener by the day. Tourists flock to witness the eerie charm of the abandoned settlement, now home to only a handful of residents. In the 1990s the village was largely deserted as its remote location and lack of services drove people away.
Today, former resident Xu Yueding and his wife Tang Yaxue return each day to sell bottled water to curious visitors. The village has no electricity or running water, yet the encroaching vines and moss give it a hauntingly beautiful atmosphere.
7 Gottingen
Gottingen, Germany, is a very attractive university city which got a bit of media attention in 2013 for a hostile plant takeover that was aided by humans.
Much to the surprise of many residents, peaceful Gottingen stepped to the forefront of political activism when a group of pro‑marijuana activists called “A Few Autonomous Flower Children” (maybe it sounds better in German?) sowed more than the city council was prepared to reap. Suddenly, like mushrooms after a rain, the city sprouted hundreds of marijuana plants. All over the place. Anywhere they could grow.
The plants sown were low‑THC varieties that, while illegal, would be pretty pointless to smoke. The group invited submissions for a photo contest showcasing the beauty of the town’s plants; plot twist, everyone was a winner. The police used the contest photos to locate and remove the offending flora, even the decorative ones planted outside the police station.
6 Pripyat
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant melted down in 1986, a lot of the surrounding area became part of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. One of the cities in this area was Pripyat, a formerly bustling city of almost 50,000 people.
Pripyat was evacuated and has been largely left alone ever since. It became not just an abandoned city but one reclaimed by nature, with plants growing everywhere, from the seats of still‑operational bumper cars to rooftops adorned by the Soviet hammer and sickle.
Trees stretch above the city skyline, and wolves, elk, and boars wander past abandoned shops and schools. It looks like a scene from the end of the world, undisturbed by humans, left only to the plants that cover the town square and the animals that brush by them on their way around what is now their city.
5 North Brother Island
City waterways often have fascinating, storied islands that you can pass by and never know about until you look them up. One of these islands sits between the Bronx and Rikers Island in New York City and is called North Brother Island.
In 1885, the city built Riverside Hospital on the island, which served as a quarantine for patients with communicable diseases such as yellow fever and smallpox. North Brother’s most famous resident was “Typhoid” Mary Mallon, who infected many people while working as a cook, despite not showing any symptoms of the disease. She died on the island of pneumonia in 1938, having been detained there in 1907, released in 1910, and forcibly brought back in 1915.
The island was later used as veteran housing and then to treat heroin addicts. It has been abandoned since 1963 and has been thoroughly reclaimed by nature as a bird sanctuary for black‑crowned night herons.
On the island, the still‑standing red brick buildings are slowly being draped by vines. Vegetation grows close to the windows, and thick trees that would have been seeds at the time it was abandoned are now pressing near the walls. Some floors are covered in a blanket of moss. From the Bronx shore, the island looks cloaked in greenery, with only the hospital chimneys hinting at its past.
4 The SS Ayrfield
Most places where trees grow are earthly ones. True, some trees do grow on roofs and in rooms, but there is at least one boat where trees have taken root and grown, making the vessel a permanent fixture and attraction in Homebush Bay in New South Wales.
The SS Ayrfield, before it became a water‑bound jardinière, was a steam collier built in the UK in 1911 and registered in Sydney in 1912. It spent the years of World War II taking supplies to Australian soldiers in the South Pacific under the name SS Corrimal. It changed hands several times and was renamed Ayrfield in 1951 by the Miller Steamship Company.
The ship was sent to Homebush Bay to be destroyed in 1972 and is still there. Clearly, it isn’t going anywhere now, and neither are its trees.
3 Clovis
It seems that Wangaratta wasn’t the first town to be invaded by tumbleweed, and the sheer volume of tumbleweed that rolled into Clovis, New Mexico, in 2014 might have made that plant attack worse.
People were trapped in their houses, roads were impassable, and Clovis residents had to dig themselves out. The tumbleweed took over the town in piles that covered entire apartments. Luckily for the residents of Clovis, the city did help with the removal of the tumbleweed. Scooping up and disposing of the giant attacking plant balls was a mammoth job.
2 Cambodian Temples
Everyone is familiar with the temple complex of Angkor Wat. Although it isn’t the only Khmer‑built temple complex in Cambodia, it seems to be the most well‑known. Many people travel to Cambodia specifically to visit its historical temples, many of which have fallen to ruin in the jungle.
The trees that have so gracefully taken over Cambodia’s temples are strangler figs, and that’s not just a name. The trees strangle and crush anything they grow around, from other host trees to the rock temples that they wind around like wooden anacondas, crushing the structures from the foundations to the roofs. The giant trees send roots into every kind of crevice, wedging them open and holding them secure at the same time.
Platforms have been built so that tourists can have their photos taken with the giant roots of the strangler fig, smiling next to a force of nature that is both destructive and protective.
1 Ross Island
When Britain ruled India, they established a penal settlement in the Andaman Islands. They needed somewhere for the administrators of the penal settlement to live, and they chose Ross Island, which had originally been inhabited for a few years in the late 1780s but had been abandoned.
Almost exactly a century later, it was rebuilt, and the British lived there until 1942, when the islands were captured by the Japanese.
After the Japanese surrender, the island was handed back to Britain and then back to India when India won its independence. The island and its structures—homes, a hospital, a church, shopping facilities, and a big swimming pool—have been reclaimed by the roots of the ficus plant. The plants have all but obscured the buildings, criss‑crossing root systems engulfing the structures.
Ross Island has become a tourist attraction serviced by a ferry, offering visitors a glimpse into a possible future where humans are gone and plants have reclaimed everything.
Christy Heather is an Australian novelist, professional writer, and criminal lawyer who is not covered in vines.