Nine-year-old Alice Hart grows up in an isolated, idyllic home between sugar cane fields and the sea, where her mother’s enchanting flowers and their hidden messages shelter her from the dark moods of her father. When tragedy irrevocably changes her life, Alice goes to live with the grandmother she never knew existed, on an Australian native flower farm that gives refuge to women who, like Alice, are lost or broken. In the Victorian tradition, every flower has a meaning and, as she settles into her new life, Alice uses this language of native flowers to say the things that are too hard to speak.

As she grows older, family secrecy, a devastating betrayal and a man who’s not all he seems combine to make Alice realise there are some stories that flowers alone cannot tell. If she is to have the freedom she craves, she must find the courage to possess the most powerful story she knows: her own.