Ralph Milne Farley 12 min read

On his palatial terrace at sunset, botany professor Gordon recounts to his guest the strange love-life of the vallisneria, a rare pond-plant whose one moonlit night of love holds a dark secret.

Ralph Milne Farley's 1937 story is an atmospheric fantasy-horror tale. Eerie, imaginative, well-told. Read it for a creeping weird tale that grows a genuine botanical curiosity into something sinister, where an obsession with a strange aquatic plant leads toward horror, in the moody, science-tinged style of the classic weird-fiction magazines.

In its time

Published in 1937, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

12 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Margaret Brundage