The Garden Rebellion (comic story)

Summary
A trip for the Doctor and Heather to Hyde Park in the future finds it paved over and being used as a car park. Racing to a sudden explosion at the Royal Albert Hall, they find panic and chaos. From the explosion and derelicts on the streets they see a band of rebels trying to escape from an army of hissing, highly mobile tripods, each housing a plant in their domed structures, chanting in unison “Monoxise the humans. Monoxise!”

The Doctor and Heather join they fleeing humans. They become separated when the ground drops away. The Doctor falls into an underground group of survivors hiding from the tripods.

The Doctor learns the tripods (“half robot, half garden centre”), are called Gardenizens. They were eco-drones designed to offset the carbon footprint of everyone in Britain. Some were even given individual names by their owners. One day they turned on people and started rounding them up and taking them to prison camps. The nearest camp and main control centre is in Kew Gardens.

After the Doctor leads a party to release the captives, he goes to learn who is leading the Gardenizens. In the command centre the Doctor is taken to a beautiful giant plant, a collective super-brain of the eco-drones. Detecting that the Doctor’s biology is different, the command flower explains that because the people have rendered Earth unfit to sustain life, plant life has turned against humanity and is no longer willing to sustain it.

The Doctor talks to the plant and convinces it that the humans and plants can live together. Given a second chance, the Gardenizens once more become inactive. The Doctor tells Heather that “talking to plants keeps them happy!”

Characters

 * The Doctor
 * Heather McCrimmon

Original print details (Publication with page count and closing captions)

 * 1) DWA 144 (4 pages) NEXT WEEK! Space goats!

Reprints

 * None to date

Continuity

 * The Doctor is featured wearing his brown suit and brown coat in this strip.
 * A Gardenizen was named Arthur by an 'owner'. This is also the name chosen for the horse ridden by the Tenth Doctor in DW: The Girl in the Fireplace.

Timeline

 * This story takes place after DWA: One Careful Owner.
 * This story takes place before DWA: The Goats of Christmas Past.