My neighbourhood haunt, the park next door, is haunted!  Monstrous creatures lurk everywhere, even near the rose trellis. Captured by my camera, Jabba the Hutt's offspring disguised as a rosebud!

Need a bit of a walk to shake that one off...

Even on a sunlit afternoon, the tall trees cast dark shadows.  As I move in closer, I see that the  leaves are covered with something strange...

Teeth!!!!

On every leaf...all the way up the tree...

Are you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.  I contacted Mark Stewart, the Knowledge Resources Manager of  the Toronto Botanical Garden.  He studied the photographs, and emailed back:

"Those do look like teeth!...I'd say they are leaf galls.  Galls on plants are abnormal growths of plant tissue as a result of some sort of external influence.  It is the plant's attempt to cordon off and contain the work of another organism.  Galls can be formed by invading insects (like aphids), bacteria, or fungi.  Different species of invaders tend to target different species and will actually introduce chemical to the plant's tissues to control its growth and form galls".

It's what Stewart had to say next, that really spooked me.  "The galls serve as microhabitats for the larvae of insects which develop inside them and then emerge.  They are like nurseries for the insect's young, providing both food and shelter while they develop".  Did he say, "emerge"?!!  All of those insects, emerging out of those toothy galls, like a swarm of Hitchcock's birds!

I'm heading back to the rose garden...

Doesn't this shadow look just like a cute little squirrel, hiding behind the backlit white rose?  Cute to you and me, but if you're a rose, you know that a squirrel will devour you and your buds!  To a rose, that little squirrel shadow is as creepy as Count Orlok's shadow climbing the wall in Nosferatu... 

  

The park's roses and trees are haunted with shadowy creatures, monsters, and plants with teeth that serve as incubators for swarming insects (they could hatch Halloween night!!!).  Maybe I'll just stand over by the tall grasses...

Or maybe not...

The White Walkers in Game of Thrones, are the scariest creatures of all.  They're no longer "beyond the wall" - they're in the park next door!

Happy Halloween!

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated

Except photographs from these productions:

Jabba the Hutt first appeared in George Lucas' Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983), grossing out everyone, and helping the box office gross enormously.  Jabba the Hutt later appeared in Star Wars: A New Hope (1997),  Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999), and the television series Star Wars:  The Clone Wars (2008-2015). 

Everyone's favourite rock-musical-horror-comedy film, Little Shop of Horrors (1986), produced by David Geffen, and directed by Frank Oz, featured puppets designed by Lyle Conway.  There were six Audrey II puppets, one for each stage of growth of the plant.  The last one, weighed one ton, and needed 60 technicians to operate it.

The 1922 silent movie, Nosferatu is as much a story of blood sucking plagiarism, as it is about a Count who drinks human blood.  The film was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker's heirs won a law suit, and all the copies of the film had to be destroyed. 

The White Walkers in Game of Thrones are the artistic creation of Martin Rezard.  The French-born artist, sculptor and prosthetics genius has worked on both Harry Potter and The Hobbit films.