22 Great Novels About Gardens

Book Summary

Sadie’s family owns a nursery that has supplied the top landscape architects on the East Coast for decades. But in 1893, as the economy plummets into a depression, Sadie’s father begins pressuring her to marry for wealth and stability. Sadie has other ideas for her future. She pursues new business from her father’s wealthiest clients of the Gilded Age in an attempt to save the family nursery.

The more time she spends in the mansions and secluded gardens of the elite, the more she sees the disparity of those struggling with poverty and starvation. She finds a new passion in her desire to bring natural beauty to those who can’t afford private gardens. Along the way, Sadie is also reunited with a former employee and former love, Sam.

Book Summary

Landscape architect Isaac is working at a beautiful estate in Cornwall, but he knows he’ll soon be called away to what seems to be the inevitable war. Cordelia is the daughter of the estate, and despite her mother’s concerns that it is unladylike to play in the dirt, she’s drawn to the garden as her escape. Isaac secretly teaches Cordelia how to tend the gardens so the house will still be able to produce food while the men are at war.

Although the connection between Isaac and Cordelia is clear, their love is forbidden as they are from different classes, and Isaac is an employee of the estate. However, when he’s called off to fight, he doesn’t forget her and begins sending letters. When the letters stop, Cordelia is determined to find out what happened.

Book Summary

Inspired by real events, this novel tells the story of the women who kept the Royal Botanic Gardens alive in London amidst a war. Ivy & Louisa enlist as gardeners to replace men who have gone to fight, but not everyone is ready for women to work at Kew. However, under their care, the gardens flourish and become a place of solace.

Book Summary

Twenty-one-year-old Emily’s parents have been keeping her close to home ever since her brother, Freddie, was killed in the war. While her parents just want to keep her safe, Emily is longing to find a purpose and a way to honor her brother. When she meets a young Australian pilot who is recuperating at a hospital near her home, she falls in love and accepts his proposal.

When he is sent back to the front lines, Emily volunteers as a “land girl,” and is assigned to tend to the grounds of a neglected Devonshire estate. It is here that she discovers the journals of a medicine woman who dedicated her life to her herbal garden. Soon Emily learns that her fiance has died in the war and that she is with child. Inspired by the journals, Emily comes to learn the healing power of herbs, but the journals will also bring her to the brink of disaster.

Book Summary

In 1822 Edinburgh was focused on interlated events. First, the old Botanical Garden is moving to a new home on the slopes below Inverleith House. It’s quite a spectacle with full-grown trees being transported on horse-drawn carts. The opening of the new Royal Botanic Garden coincides with the rumored upcoming visit of King George IV. Additionally, the Agave Americana plant looks set to flower – an event that only occurs once in several decades.

In the midst of the excitement, an unlikely friendship forms. Newly widowed Elizabeth arrives from London to live with her late husband’s aunt Clementina. Her new grand home borders the new Botanic Garden, and Elizabeth volunteers as an artist to document the impending bloom of the Agave Americana. At the garden, Elizabeth meets Belle, who has a passion for botany and the lucrative, dark art of perfume creation. But Belle isn’t telling the truth about her true identity.

Book Summary

Saffron is a rare female research assistant with a vast knowledge of poisons. While at a dinner party, her professor’s wife drops to the floor. She expected to spend the night talking about an upcoming expedition to the Amazon, but now her mentor, Dr. Maxwell, is the main suspect. He’s always been more supportive of her than others in the all-male, very old-school department, so she wants to help.

Saffron must work to clear his name before the departure date to Brazil. She’ll need her extensive knowledge of botany as she partners with fellow researcher Alexander to investigate greenhouses and dark gardens, looking for the deadly poison.

Book Summary

After losing her husband in WWII and her daughter to illness, Iris walled herself off from the world. She’s spent many decades hiding behind the tall fence around her home. In place of human connection, Iris has surrounded herself with a family of flowers. Propagating her daylilies and roses and tending to a garden that helps her keep memories of those she loved alive.

In the early 2000s, Abby is a young mother whose husband has recently returned from military service in Iraq. When Abby’s family rents a cottage along Lake Michigan, next door to Iris’ property, the older woman can’t help but view the young family as a window to the life she once had.

As Iris and Abby are drawn together by their shared love of flowers, the friendship that blossoms between them is a testament to the healing power of both gardening and human connection.

Book Summary

Yun Ling grew up in northern Malaysia, among the plantations and jungles, before studying law at Cambridge (like the author himself, who grew up in Malaysia and studied law in England). 

In 1949, Yun Ling discovered the only Japanese garden in Malaysia and tried to engage its creator, the exiled former gardener to the Emperor of Japan. She wants him to create a garden in Kuala Lumpur in memory of her sister. He refuses to design the garden for her, but agrees to take her on as his apprentice to teach her the art.

As a survivor of Japanese brutality during the war that claimed her sister’s life, Yun Ling holds anger toward the Japanese. But inside the Garden of Evening Mists, she is drawn to the story of the gardener. The garden is a place of mystery: why did the gardener leave Japan? Why does Yun Ling’s host seem immune to the depredations of the Communists? And what is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war?

Book Summary

Long before spring meant placing orders for seeds through gardening catalogs, the Dakhótas relied on their strong seed-saving traditions for survival. While this book will teach you about that seed-saving heritage, it also covers so much more.

Rosalie Iron Wing grew up learning about plants and her ancestry as a Dakhóta from her father. However, when he goes missing, she is sent to live with a foster family. Decades later, Rosalie is now both a mother and the widow of a farmer. She still takes solace in their land, although it has been threatened by both nature and man.

When Rosalie returns to her birthplace to learn more about her family history, she learns about the trauma of boarding schools, the war between the Dakhótas and the government, and the cache of seeds that survived through generations.

Book Summary

Poppy’s parents are Napa Valley hoteliers, but she left home to become a perfumer in Paris. However, when her heightened sense of smell disappears, her career is in danger, and she retreats home to California. She hopes that tending to her grandmother’s aromatic garden will restore her gift. 

However, when she arrives, the garden has been uprooted and destroyed. This is a visceral reminder of how her ties to home have been weakened while she was away. Now, to heal, she must juggle family drama, old friendships, and a former love.

Book Summary

Grad student Lucy travels to England in an attempt to solve a literary mystery and finish her dissertation about Elizabeth Blackspear, a famous garden writer. Lucy has a stack of letters between her grandmother and Elizabeth, and the letters seem to include coded references. Things get interesting when an elderly aristocrat with his own secret connection to Elizabeth lets Lucy into his neglected walled garden. 

However, the Blackspear Gardens director refuses to give Lucy access to the archives. As she continues her research, she uncovers a plan to turn the historic gardens into a theme park, and she must race to save the beautiful land. All the while, she’s trying to determine her grandmother’s connection to Blackspear and trying not to fall in love with a Spanish contractor.

Book Summary

The Akha people live in a remote mountain village in China, where, for generations, their lives have revolved around farming tea. Li-yan is one of the few educated girls in the village, and everything begins to change for her when a stranger arrives at the village gate driving a jeep—the first automobile any of them have ever seen. Little by little, Li-yan begins to reject the customs of her village.

When Li-yan becomes pregnant out of wedlock, local tradition calls for her to give her child over to be killed. Instead, she flees to a nearby city, where she leaves her baby at an orphanage. She then remains in the city and puts her experience and education to use by pursuing a career in the tea business outside of the fields.

Li-yan’s daughter is adopted by loving American parents and is raised in a life of privilege in California. As she grows, she continues to wonder about her origins, and back in China, the mother she never knew longs for her as well. The two remain connected across the continents by their family heritage of tea.

Book Summary

Each Waverly family member has a unique gift, and these peculiar gifts have turned them into outsiders in their North Carolina town. Even their garden and apple tree are special, with prophetic fruit and edible flowers that inspire new powers.

Claire Waverly is a caterer who uses mystical plants like snapdragons, pansies, and nasturtiums from the Waverly garden in her cooking to help her customers. Her elderly cousin Evanelle is also known for distributing clever gifts.

Claire and Evanelle are the last of the Waverlys tending the gardens, but Claire has a rebellious sister named Syndey who fled town years earlier. When Syndey unexpectedly returns with a young daughter, Claire’s peaceful life is turned upside down.

Book Summary

At the beginning of this novel, the main character, Alice, is only 9 years old and is sent away from her seaside home to live with her estranged grandmother, June, on a flower farm. Over the years, she learns both the language of flowers and about all the women her grandmother has taken in over the years to help them heal from abusive situations. 

However, Alice eventually realizes that she has her own unhealed wounds and flees the flower farm. She ends up in the remote, beautiful central desert of Australia. She thinks she has found peace until her new love, Dylan, is much different than she expected.

Book Summary

Young widow Lili is three years past the car accident that unexpectedly made her a single mom of two young children.

She works as an illustrator and has been chosen to create the drawings for a prestigious boutique vegetable guide. But that means she’s also been assigned to attend a 6-week vegetable gardening class for some real-world veggie experiences. Despite convincing her kids and sister to join her in the class, she’s still not overjoyed with this required course. However, one patient instructor and a cast of quirky classmates later, she’ll realize the class isn’t so bad. 

While there is a minor romance thread, this is not a romance novel. Instead, it’s somehow both funny and emotional, with themes of sister relationships, family, and healing.

Book Summary

Abandoned at birth by her mother, Victoria Jones spent her childhood in no fewer than 32 foster homes. At age 9, Victoria wanted nothing more than to be adopted by a woman named Elizabeth, but something went terribly wrong. Nine years later, having aged out of the foster care system at age 18, Victoria finds herself homeless on the streets of San Francisco.

All those years before, Elizabeth instilled a love of flowers and their meanings in Victoria. While Victoria is unable to get close to anyone, she finds that she can communicate through flowers, and she gets a job working for a florist named Renata. When Victoria meets a flower farmer named Grant, her past and present begin to collide. She is forced to confront some painful secrets for a second chance at happiness.

Book Summary

When Sadie doesn’t get the promotion she both needs and expects, she immediately adds three things to her to-do list – a drink, a one-night stand, and a new place to live. Unfortunately, she tackles these tasks in the wrong order. The drinks turn into Sadie mixing up a dating app and a roommate app. Whoops!

Jack has been dealing with the unexpected death of his parents by escaping into movies and video games alone. After hearing her story, he offers Sadie the spare bedroom in his gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone at an excellent price.

The cheap rent lets her grow her former side business as a florist into a full-time gig. But how long can these polar opposites happily coexist in one house?

Book Summary

Fifth-generation cider-maker Sanna is devoted to her family’s struggling orchard. However, her brother is pushing their father to sell the land.

Single dad Isaac packed up his son Sebastian and headed across the country to keep him safe. When chance leads him to Sanna’s orchard, his help with the apple trees becomes essential and it feels more like fate that he arrived when he did.

However, Isaac and Sebastian’s arrival also complicates Sanna’s life, especially when an outside threat comes to the farm.

Book Summary

Paige was widowed two years ago and still isn’t quite back to “normal.” Now, her trusted boss of 22 years is also gone, and his son has taken over. He’s radically changing everything at the advertising firm, including an announcement that he’s getting rid of 2 employees at the end of the summer.

Paige is trying to hold on to her job and sanity for her teenage son’s sake, but her formerly perfect house and yard are both a mess. 

As she tries to escape her new work problems on her back porch over a glass of wine, her nosy neighbor lectures her about the dandelions in her yard. In frustration, she pours another glass of wine and begins yanking out the dandelions one by one…and it feels GOOD. Before long, she was looking for a shovel for more yard therapy. 

Paige creates a bigger and bigger hole in her yard, much to the chagrin of her fancy suburban neighbors. But it’s helping her cope with the ongoing craziness at work and her lingering grief. Despite her inexperience in gardening and pushy neighbors, she finally begins to feel fully alive again.

Book Summary

As a botanist, forty-year-old May prefers spending time with plants over people. She’s a gardener for a local university and likes to observe the lives of others while minimizing her interactions with them. However, in her younger years, she had a group of four close friends.

While it’s not feasible to get the group back together in one place, May sets out to reconnect with them one by one during an unexpected hiatus from work. Part tale of self-discovery and part story of female friendship, this book also explores themes of life’s offline simplicities vs. images of perfection online.