Like I said, gardening was never my thing. If I spent time outside, it was playing tennis or lounging in the sun, blithely ignoring my mother’s dire warnings about skin cancer. I had no interest in getting my hands dirty and no use for a place that required so much labor to make it beautiful or interesting. I’d never seen a garden that intrigued me in any way.

But this . . . this was different.

It was huge, explosive with color and the scent of fragrant flowers, and the path wound away through a cluster of topiaries in the shapes of animals, like a secret walkway into another world. I wandered through arbors draped with delicate vines and down short straightaways lined with grasses that bent over into my path and brushed against my green pants. Every so often, a rosebush was placed like an elegant chaperone to the rest of the sprawling madness, and the roses were in full bloom, in shades ranging from pearlescent white to a red so velvety and deep it didn’t seem like my eyes were processing the whole color.

“Do you like it?” Laura asked, a few feet behind me.

I nodded, still looking ahead. A sprawling plant with enormous leaves draped over a huge area of ground, and under the leaves I saw the pale green baby pumpkins, each one tiny and perfect. Beyond those were three long rows of pepper plants in flawlessly straight lines.

“The women in my family have always cared for the garden,” she said. “Every fall, we carry what we can into the greenhouse, and every spring we bring it all back out—well, most of it. Sometimes I don’t get to everything. You wouldn’t believe my collection of old bulbs! Of course, some species can’t be transplanted, but most of it will survive. And some of them are tough enough to face the winter without help.”

“It must cost a fortune,” I said, and then I blushed and looked away, hoping she hadn’t heard.

“Oh, it does, I suppose.” She didn’t sound bothered—by either my question or the idea of spending tons of money. “But it’s tradition.”

I walked past a small colony of tomato plants in their little round cages and reached an empty area, two long planters’ worth of plain dirt. At the end of the rows was a stock of pots, empty buckets, stacks of bricks, and bags of soil and fertilizer.

“Oh, that’s just storage,” Laura said.

But beyond those, where the walkway curved, there was a gate made of ironwork in the shape of a man and woman, fig leaves tastefully placed, an apple in the woman’s hand and a snake wrapped around her ankle.

I walked closer, inspecting the craftsmanship. It was handmade, and you could still see the marks of hammers on the iron pieces.