All Madis Harrah wants is to finish her first season of landscaping without any more drama. No more persnickety customers, no more hassle of organizing invoices, and no more equipment hiccups. It’s almost fall, so it should be easy to wrap up her debut year of business without a headache, right? Wrong. As a finale, she begins work on a large estate just outside the small town of Payton. The owner is a former classmate, and while it’s great reuniting with a familiar face, it’s not so nice to discover the property vandalized. This isn’t a one-time incident, either, and when Madis’s project is destroyed, it seems the end of the season will only be soiled with mischief. Can she help identify the vandal before she loses the job?

Spring is just around the corner, and Madis is back with more business than she might be able to handle. But she’s hired a couple of new faces to add to her small crew, and it seems like it’ll be a productive start to the season of landscaping. Properly staffed and rested after the winter break, it should be all systems go. Not quite. Before her employees can really get busy, Madis encounters a dead man lying in a bed of ivy and tulip sprouts. Her entire crew is questioned since they’ve visited the scene, but they’re not the only ones under suspicion. The victim had enemies aplenty, from an angry former lover, a nosy neighbor, and a competitive rival. While there’s no such thing as bad publicity, finding a corpse at a jobsite isn’t ideal. Can she figure out who the killer is before things get muddier?

Rosie Tanner’s retiring, and she wants to gift herself a masterpiece of petunias. Madis is more than willing to take on the task, hoping this elaborate display of annuals will win her a regional gardening contest. Only, on the first day of the big project, someone attempts to murder the sweet librarian in her very own backyard. While the petunias are being planted, Madis vows to keep an eye on Rosie, but it’s not so easy when no one can guess who the perpetrator is. Rosie begs her to find a confidential note that flew out of her hands when she was ambushed, and the threat Madis finds in the garden offers many questions and few answers. Is someone out to sabotage Rosie’s last project of her career? Will someone stoop to murder to get her job? Or will another peril bloom as secrets are exposed…