Spring is here and so is the season of blooming gardens and fragrant flowers!
Mirroring our outside world, and to give your reading list a touch of the freshness of spring, here are some fiction and mystery books and ebooks featuring gardens, flowers and gardeners, available with your Livingston Library card.
The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin
Every bouquet tells a story. And every story begins at Blossom & Grow, a tiny flower shop in the heart of Dublin… Among the buckets of fragrant blooms, beneath the flickering candles and lanterns, Lara works her magic, translating feelings into flower arrangements that change hearts and lives.
Flowers and Foul Play : A Magic Garden Mystery by Amanda Flower
This is the first in Flower’s Magic Garden mystery series. Fiona Knox lost her fiancé and her flower shop–but when she flies to Scotland to inherit her godfather’s cottage and possibly magical walled garden, she may lose her life as well when she’s swept into a murder investigation.
The Forbidden Garden by Ellen Herrick
An American nursery owner with a rare gift with plants jumps at the chance to help revive a run-down, Shakespearean garden on a country estate in England and becomes intrigued with the house’s haunting history and the owner’s brother-in-law.
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
The story hops between memories of England in the early 1900s and Brisbane between the 1930s and 2005. On Nell’s death, her granddaughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious among the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold-secrets about the doomed family and their ward, a writer of dark Victorian fairy tales. It is here that secrets about the family are revealed, and the century-old mystery of a little girl lost is solved.
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Lillian Girvan didn’t plan to be a widow at 34, and three years later, she still sometimes wishes she had died alongside Dan. Her job as a textbook illustrator seems to be coming to an end. When Lili is offered an opportunity to illustrate an encyclopedia of vegetables if she’ll attend a gardening class, she never imagines it to be the beginning of the moving-on process, but move on she does. A band of unique gardeners and a hot Dutch gardening instructor show Lili that she may still have life in her yet.
Garden Spells: A Novel by Sarah Addison Allen
In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous debut novel, Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree, and the extraordinary people who tend it….
The Heirloom Garden by Viola Shipman
Iris Maynard lost her husband in World War II, her daughter to illness and, finally, her reason to live. Walled off from the world for decades behind the towering fence surrounding her home, Iris has built a new family…of flowers. Iris propagates her own daylilies and roses while tending to a garden filled with the heirloom starts that keep the memories of her loved ones alive. When Abby Peterson moves next door with her family–a husband traumatized by his service in the Iraq War and a young daughter searching for stability–Iris is reluctantly yet inevitably drawn into her boisterous neighbor’s life, where, united by loss and a love of flowers, she and Abby tentatively unearth their secrets, and help each other discover how much life they have yet to live.
The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly
A poignant and unforgettable tale of five women living across three different times whose lives are all connected by one very special garden. Emma Lovett, who has dedicated her career to breathing new life into long-neglected gardens, has just been given the opportunity of a lifetime: to restore the gardens of the famed Highbury House estate, designed in 1907 by her hero Venetia Smith. But as Emma dives deeper into the gardens’ past, she begins to uncover secrets that have long lain hidden.
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The story of a woman whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of others even as she struggles to overcome her own past.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland
After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak. Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story.
The Red Garden: A Novel by Alice Hoffman
A transfixing glimpse into a small American town where a mysterious, magical garden holds the truth behind three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption.
-Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian