Rhonda Nowak

“What is it about the garden that suits it to murder? Plants, plantings, and various horticultural paraphernalia make frequent appearances in mysteries, whether detective fiction or the more generic crime or gothic.”

—  Marta McDowell, “Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers,” 2023

The New York Times bestselling author Marta McDowell is right — gardens do frequently pop up in mystery novels like tulips in spring. A case in point: I just finished reading “The Paris Apartment” by another New York Times bestselling author, Lucy Foley, in which (spoiler alert!) a courtyard garden does, indeed, provide an expedient setting to conceal evidence of a crime.

McDowell has a theory about why gardens and murder mysteries go so well together. “Perhaps it’s the gardener’s natural malice toward weeds, rodents, and other garden undesirables,” she muses. “Rare is the gardener who can approach a slug without homicidal intent.”

Ever since Eden, she notes, gardens have repeatedly been the places where authors have chosen to engage their characters in the timeless struggle between good and evil. William Shakespeare, for example, placed many of his important scenes in gardens: Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark, was murdered in a garden, Romeo and Juliet proclaim their love for one another in an orchard garden, the fairies in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” play tricks in a woodland garden, and the nobles in “Henry VI, Part 1” declare war in a rose garden.

I’ve read three of McDowell’s books prior to this one: “Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life” (2013), “All the Presidents’ Gardens” (2016) and “Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life” (2019), so I knew I would enjoy her most recent contribution to garden literature. I have not been disappointed. My “To Read” list has grown as fast as those diabolical weeds in my garden, and now I’m actually looking forward to triple-digit temperatures this summer when I can justify spending all day on the couch immersed in a garden mystery.

Who knew there were so many to choose from?

Agatha Christie, for example, introduced the world to Miss Jane Marple in 1930 when she published “Murder at the Vicarage.” Miss Marple, an avid knitter and gardener, turns into a top-rate amateur sleuth over the course of twelve novels and twenty short stories. (Christie finally retired her in 1971). Many of the stories feature the outspoken Miss Marple offering solicited and unsolicited horticultural advice, a habit that might have been drawn from Christie herself, who was known to garden at her vacation home, called Greenway House, in Devon.

According to McDowell’s garden mystery book list, Christie wrote garden-related plotlines for nineteen of her books, including her first novel, “The Murderous Affair at Styles,” which was written on a dare from her sister and published in 1920.

But Agatha Christie was not the first crime writer to endow a protagonist with green thumbs (or green fingers, as McDowell tells us is the proper term in the UK). That distinction goes to Wilkie Collins, a friend of Charles Dickens, who published “The Moonstone” in 1868. Collins’ hero is Sgt. Cuff, an inspector at what’s now known as Scotland Yard. Sgt. Cuff is longing for the day when he can retire from catching criminals and devote all his time to his true love — roses.

McDowell weaves in garden history throughout the book, in this case by pointing out that Sgt. Cuff’s passion for roses reflected a high level of enthusiasm for hybridizing roses during the 19th century when plant breeders began crossing the China rose, Rosa chinensis, with other varieties.

She writes, “By the reign of Victoria [1837-1901], a rose garden was a must, whether you were one of the landed gentry…or stood solidly with Sgt. Cuff in the echelons of the respectable working class.”

Besides Wilkie Collins’ Sgt. Cuff and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, McDowell’s discussion of garden mystery writers and their protagonists encompasses British and American authors who published from 1870 (Charles Dickens’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”) to 2022 (Kate Khavari’s debut novel “A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons.”

Four of Arthur Conan Doyle’s books (published between 1887 and 1917) are included on McDowell’s book list, as well as four books by contemporary garden mystery writer Susan Wittig Albert, author of the China Bayles series (1992-2024) and the Darling Dahlias series (2010-2022). Along with Albert, fifteen of the listed authors have produced garden mystery series, from Rex Stouts’ Detective Nero Wolfe series (1934-1975) to Rosemary Harris’ Dirty Business mystery series (2008-2014).

Another contemporary garden mystery writer who is now on my “To Read” list is Ovidia Yu, considered to be Singapore’s first feminist author. Her garden mystery series (2017-2025) is set in Singapore and features different native trees, such as frangipani, betel nut, mimosa and angsana. Yu’s protagonist is Chen Sue Lin, a 16-year-old Chinese orphan who develops her detective skills during the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1942 to 1945.

Why do writers write about gardens? McDowell explains it this way: “Writers write what they know, and there are many writer-gardeners. In their gardens, they research, they discover setting, motive, means, and clues…The skill of the author transforms the horticultural into the mysterious.”

Who among us gardener-readers can resist a horticultural mystery that is actually solved at the end of the day?