I enjoy Noble's writing and characterizations a lot, as well as her light touch of humor. but there isn't much in the way of GMC or real tension in this story of a gardener/botanist young lady who falls for an older medical man when he facilitates her coming to town to present her new breed of roses to the Horticultural Society. Both Margaret Babcock and Rhys Gray are unconventional, people of science and inquiry, so they make a great couple. But the stuff keeping them apart—Rhys' promise to his mother that he'll marry the daughter of their neighbor, a man whom his father once wounded in a duel, so said father and brother can return from exile on the Continent—isn't all that compelling, and the climactic reveal of the villain was disappointing from a feminist point of view.