Plants vs. Zombies was at one point going to be called "Lawn of the Dead", a pun on George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. The name was changed for legal reasons.

There is a zombie called a Dancing Zombie that looks like an undead Michael Jackson from Thriller (that even does the moonwalk). He even summons back-up dancers that look like they are from 80's. His description says "Any resemblance between Dancing Zombie and persons living or dead is purely coincidental." After the death of Michael Jackson, the zombie was redesigned to look more like a disco dancer, and the back up dancer were redesigned to look like they were from the same time.

The Minigame 'Zombiquarium' is a direct parody of another PopCap game called Insaniquarium.

The lawn string text codes in the PC version of the game contain names of three enemies that are never seen in the game: Dog Zombies, Walking Dog Zombies, and Propeller Zombies. The reason why they're not in the game is currently unknown.

In the "Achievement" menu, continuing to scroll down the page, past the list of achievements, will reveal a number of characters and items referencing previous Popcap games.

At the very bottom of the page are Zombies dressed in Chinese attire situated in front of a pagoda, implying it is the other side of the Earth.

By hacking the game, it is possible to access ten unused mini-games along with four variations on survival endless. All mini-games are fully functional, with the exception of Ice Level.

Exclusive to the console versions of the game, there is a very small, randomly-generated chance of a Zombie having a nut allergy, meaning it can die when it tries to eat a Wall-nut or a Tall-nut. When this happens, a rare death animation is triggered where the Zombie suffers a severe allergic reaction until it collapses and dies.

Several scrapped ideas for plants can be found in an early build from 2008, and almost all of them made it over to different games in different ways:

• The Beehive, which would have shot bees at Balloon Zombies, was repurposed as the Beeshooter in Plants vs. Zombies: Adventures, a now-defunct Facebook game.
• Iceberg Lettuce, which was seemingly a freezing version of Lettuce-pult like Snow Pea and Winter Melon, had its name repurposed into a plant in Plants vs. Zombies 2, which froze zombies that stepped on it for a few seconds.
• Time Stopper was repurposed as Thyme Warp, which instead of refreshing all plants would send all zombies back to the start of the lawn at full health.
• Yampoline was repurposed as Spring Bean, but would send zombies backward instead of forward.

Not all were repurposed, as Tuber, Cherry Hover-Bomb and Duplicator Cycler were never reused, most likely due to their redundancy.