The Bongleweed

by Helen Cresswell

A hilarious story about the bongleweed, a weird and wonderful plant that's threatening to take over the village. It's up to Becky and Jason to try and stop the wickedly wild weed before it's too late...

Genres: Childrens, Fiction, Urban Fantasy

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Helen Cresswell (1934–2005) was an English television scriptwriter and author of more than 100 children's books, best known for comedy and supernatural fiction. Her most popular book series, Lizzie Dripping and The Bagthorpe Saga, were also the basis for television series.

Reviews

[Alex O · Rating 4 out of 5]

Becky lives with her family in the midst of Pew Gardens where her Dad works as head gardener. His boss, botanist Dr Harper, constantly crossing one plant with another, comes into possession of some strange seeds given to him by a mysterious stranger. When Becky and Dr Harper’s nephew plant these seeds, the result at first seem like an overgrown weed, until it grows three feet high overnight, sprouts exotic flowers and starts invading other people’s gardens.
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A truly peculiar little book, and much more frightening than the cover or the blurb would have you believe. The Bongleweed whispers back fragments of conversation it overhears and covers windows until it blocks out the light. In the day it’s flowers are foxes; in the night, giant moths. The plant holds such a power over Becky and her family that they can’t bear to destroy it even when it has gotten out of hand and Becky imagines it spreading and covering all of England, snaking it’s way down the motorway. The characters act so bizarrely throughout giving the book a surreal, dreamlike feel, made more intense by the heady hayfeverish descriptions of plants and gardens.
The two families are inside separated by only a thin wall, caused by a building mishap, with a secret spy hole Becky has covered with a print of Millais’ bubble boy and this strange stage allows Cresswell to play out the class disparity between the two families to comedic effect.
Like the Bongleweed itself, the book is a bizarre, twisted oddity, unfairly forgotten in the canon of children’s literature.

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[Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars really.
This was a re-read from my childhood. I liked it. I liked the dialogue, between Becky and her father. I liked that there was deeper stuff going on than a weird adventure with a plant, to do with how Becky sees her world and her place in it, how she views nature and humanity's relationship to it, plus her relationship with her father. It was refreshing to read a book about a child who was thinking about that sort of stuff.
I'm not sure that I was that happy with the ending though, I would have wanted Becky to have something more to do with what happened at the end.

[KP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable, a nice story. The end was a bit abrupt and I would have liked Becky to have made better friends with the boy next door, I felt just like her when I was young.
A shame there were no seeds left!