In 1875, Maggie Lawson did not wake each morning with the certainty that the world would grant her a fair shake. She had, at twenty-two, already spent half her life in the service of wealthy East Coast families, not as a nursemaid, nor as a cook, but as a designer of gardens?an occupation that hovered between eccentricity and scandal in a woman.

Her father, a stonemason, had not approved; her mother, dead these nine years, could only offer her silence. Each day Maggie donned her boots and canvas apron, a badge of rebellion among the ruffles and crinolines of Boston, and each day she proved, a little more, that a woman might coax beauty from the earth as well as any man.

Yet for every rose trellis she coaxed onto a sunless wall, every stony patch she turned into a riot of zinnias, there were two, three, sometimes six clients who could not see past her gender. "A lady gardener? How unusual," the matriarchs would titter behind gloved hands, and the men would glance at her with an odd mixture of curiosity and disbelief, as if she were an especially clever dog.