“The Return of the Giant Hogweed”

This article is about the song. For the plant, see Giant hogweed.

“The Return of the Giant Hogweed” is a song by the English rock band Genesis, the third track of their third album, Nursery Cryme (1971). It tells how a Victorian explorer brings the giant hogweed from the Russian hills to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and how the plant escapes, spreads and threatens humanity.¹ The song has followed the plant into the scientific literature.²

Background

The song was a collective composition of the band’s five members: Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and Phil Collins.¹

A 2024 study connects it with the summer of 1970, when British newspapers reported children burned by giant hogweed. The Lancet published a note on the plant on 4 July, and two Edinburgh doctors described its hazards in the British Medical Journal the following week.¹³⁴ The same study sees the influence of John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), whose narrator suspects that the walking plants were bred in the Soviet Union.¹

Content

The narrative follows the plant from its discovery by the explorer to its presentation at Kew, its escape into the countryside and its victory over every attempt to destroy it. The closing section, headed “The Dance of the Giant Hogweed” on the sleeve, ends by shouting a Latinate plural of the plant’s scientific name.¹a rising that no herbicide could stop

The story is close to the plant’s history, with one liberty. Giant hogweed was on the seed list at Kew by 1817, twenty years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, so the “Victorian” explorer arrived a little late.¹

Release and reception

Nursery Cryme did not chart on its release. It entered the British albums chart only on 11 May 1974, reaching number 39, and returned for a single week in March 1984.⁵ A live version of the song, recorded in Manchester on 24 February 1973, appears on the album Genesis Live (1973).¹

In the scientific literature

The standard monograph on the plant, Ecology and Management of Giant Hogweed (2007), prints lines from the song as mottos at the heads of its chapters.² The chapter on the history of the invasion opens with one.⁶ The book’s concluding chapter begins by recalling the song, and describes the plant as a “tabloid archetypal plant invader”.²

Other works

The plant has also appeared in fiction, among others in Felice Holman’s novel The Escape of the Giant Hogstalk (1974), reissued as The Escape of the Giant Hogweed (1978), and in Charlotte MacLeod’s mystery The Curse of the Giant Hogweed (1985).¹ For its later career in Russian and Polish art and theatre, see Sosnowsky’s hogweed § In culture.

See also

• Giant hogweed § In culture
• Hogquote

Footnotes

1. Fagioli, S. (2024). “Mantegazza pop. Dall’Heracleum mantegazzianum di Sommier & Levier a The return of the Giant Hogweed dei Genesis e oltre”. Archivio per l’Antropologia e la Etnologia. 154: 83–97. doi:10.36253/aae-3089. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Pyšek, P.; Cock, M. J. W.; Nentwig, W.; Ravn, H. P. (2007). “Master of all traits: can we successfully fight giant hogweed?”. In Pyšek, P.; et al. (eds.). Ecology and Management of Giant Hogweed. Wallingford: CAB International. pp. 297–312. doi:10.1079/9781845932060.0297. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. “The giant hogweed” (1970). The Lancet. 296 (7662): 32. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(70)92490-6. ↩

4. Drever, J. C.; Hunter, J. A. A. (1970). “Hazards of giant hogweed”. British Medical Journal. 3 (5714): 109. doi:10.1136/bmj.3.5714.109-b. ↩

5. Official Charts Company. “Nursery Cryme – Genesis”. Retrieved 26 September 2026. ↩

6. Pyšek, P.; Müllerová, J.; Jarošík, V. (2007). “Historical dynamics of Heracleum mantegazzianum invasion at regional and local scales”. In Pyšek, P.; et al. (eds.). Ecology and Management of Giant Hogweed. Wallingford: CAB International. pp. 42–54. doi:10.1079/9781845932060.0042. ↩