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Married life for Tim Thorburn hasn't been good, but his business has been, and he has a new idea for his next business venture. He wants to be known as The Man Who Rediscovered the Medlar. Yet in going out into the countryside to produce award winning fruit, he never thought he would get all the help he could muster from the most unusual sources. Tim is one of life's dreamers, and would love nothing more than to be a grower of the most unusual fruit imaginable, so that he would have the nation's best gourmets wanting to buy from him.

Tim has always enjoyed communing with nature, being around trees and plants were one of the reasons he had loved being a green-fingered Aussie, but for him it would mean he wouldn't be foraging in the outback. Instead he would find somewhere he could successfully grow the fruit he wanted, but his delving into his idea of paradise gives him a well needed shock, albeit a positive one.

Anna Tambour's story is one that wouldn't be out of place in a gardening compendium, but the fact it is fantasy literature rules that out. Her grasp of plant and flower names, even their Latin ones is admirable as it shows she has done her research on the subject, but the reason this story works is that Tim is amazed at what happens with the trees in his new garden, and what they mean to him as a gardener. In fact it goes deeper than that, in a more Doctor Dolittle way that both entertains and enlightens.

Sandra Scholes has completed her new novel, Getting To The End of The World, and her other work can be seen in the British Fantasy Society newsletter, on Active Anime and Fantasy Book Review.