Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Magic/Bubotuber

Bubotuber
Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter - Magic
Type	Magical plant
Features	Black and sluglike
First Appearance	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Overview

Bubotubers are the ugliest plants Harry has ever seen, looking like thick black slugs sticking vertically out of the plant pots.

Extended Description

Beginner warning: Details follow which you may not wish to read at your current level.

Bubotubers, despite their extreme ugliness, seem to have at least one valuable product. Large, shiny swellings grow on the plant; these are full of a yellowish-green liquid, the "pus", which smells strongly of petrol (gasoline). The raw pus can have unpleasant effects on the skin, so the harvesters must wear dragon-hide gloves; but when properly prepared, it is an excellent cure for the more stubborn forms of acne.

Analysis

Bubotubers are quite a minor sidelight into the world of magic. In this book, they are used for two things: first, to show, by making the plants in Herbology classes more dangerous, that Harry's class has advanced further in their studies, and second, to provide a reasonable noxious substance for inclusion in the hate-mail later directed at Hermione. One suspects that this work with bubotubers may be somehow associated with the jinx that Hermione later lays on Marietta Edgecombe.

Questions

Study questions are meant to be left for each student to answer; please don't answer them here.

How do you pronounce "bubotuber"?

Greater Picture

Intermediate warning: Details follow which you may not wish to read at your current level.