They meet on a spring day in the local garden center: Inge, a native Swede, lovely and refined, is a woman ruled by reason and her own deeply held moral beliefs; and Mira, a Chilean immigrant who still feels out of place in the cold Scandinavian north, and has spent far too much of her life searching for meaning. Intrigued by one another, the two women are nevertheless wary of the great cultural differences that seem to separate their lives,. Yet both are single mothers devoted to their children, and both find joy and comfort in cultivating plants and flowers—and so together, they begin to develop a close bond. Through many afternoons spent amid the beauty of Inges garden, Mira slowly reveals the horrors of a shadowed past and the heartbreak involving her beloved daughter.