Member's Spring 2025 Writing Competition

I’d recently retired and we were downsizing. I wanted a small house with a garden. Adam craved the inner-city vibe. We’d been house hunting for months but couldn’t find a place we could agree on, let alone one we could afford.

     Adam made an appointment to see a run-down terrace house he’d found on the internet. The agent told him the property was the deceased estate of an elderly spinster who’d lived in the house for decades. The executors of her will were prepared to negotiate on price—if they could get a quick sale.

     I hated the house from the outset. While we waited for the agent to arrive, Adam explained that the decorative iron on the verandas had been brought out from England as ballast, then cast in an Australian foundry. This was a rare design.

     Once inside the house, Adam raved about the marble fireplaces and plaster ceiling roses. I smelt the rancid stench of a corpse. I pictured the old lady’s crumpled body lying at the bottom of the stairs though I knew it was probably a dead rat in the wall.

     Nothing I said could dampen Adam’s enthusiasm as we went upstairs and checked out the bedrooms. “This is the original glass in these French doors—you can tell because of the slight imperfections.” He chipped away at me like a cockie carving a hollow in a tree.

     When we went out into the backyard, my foul mood began to mellow. There was an old jacaranda tree and a Victorian glasshouse. I opened the door and went in. I don’t know quite what I expected to see—orchids or begonias perhaps—but inside, a middle-aged woman was tending some unusual plants.

     “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m here to water Aunt Edith’s collection. It would be criminal to let them all die.”

     “What kind of plants are they?” I asked.

     “They’re insectivorous plants. Edith spent twenty years collecting more than a hundred species.”

     “Really? I thought they only grew in the tropics.”

     “You’d be surprised,” she said. “There are more species in Australia than anywhere else in the world.”

     I took a closer look. There were fly traps with spring-loaded hands, lidded pitcher plants filled with seductive nectar and others with glistening stamens.

     “They’re fascinating, aren’t they?” Adam said. “These plants are like predatory animals, luring insects to their deaths.”

     “We’ve been trying to find a new home for the collection—ideally at a botanical garden.”

     “How did she find them?” asked Adam. “Did she buy them or collect them herself?”

     “My aunt was an amazing lady, one of the first female botanists. When she was younger, she toured the outback, collecting insectivorous plants wherever she went.”

     An idea popped into my mind. What if we became the custodians of Aunt Edith’s rare collection? It would give us the perfect excuse to go on outback adventures. Who knows? This elegant glasshouse and its carnivorous plants might be the gardening project of my dreams.

After Glenys Holmes, ‘No. 17’