In the small town of Conner's, Georgia , Darcy has just started high school; her older sister, Adel, goes to dances at the army base; and their mother tends to her beautiful garden, the biggest and best in town. It's 1974, and the country is struggling to come to terms with the Vietnam War. But Darcy's world is changing forever when her mother goes to Atlanta for tests. The diagnosis is not good- breast cancer.
There is so much Darcy wants to talk to her mother about: the war and what happened to the soldiers who were in it; the feelings she is having for the new (and troubled) boy in school. But she can't. So she finds solace in her mother's garden. There she can help the flowers that her mother planted boom.