Growing Something

Book 5: A garden. A first spring alone. A reason to stay

By: C. L. Bennett

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Iris Doyle has kept her community garden plot for nine years, the last of them now alone. This is the first spring since her wife June died that she has to face the dirt by herself, and she almost let the plot go rather than do it.

Then the plot next door gets a new gardener, a professional landscaper named Jo who can grade an entire parking lot but cannot keep a tomato seedling alive. Teaching Jo the basics turns into a Saturday habit neither of them expected, and slowly, carefully, into something more.

Iris is not sure she is allowed to want this. Falling for someone new feels like a betrayal of everything she built with June, rose bush and memorial bench included, and she has to figure out whether there is room in one small garden plot for both grief and something new growing beside it.

Growing Something is a sweet, quiet sapphic romance about grief, healing, and learning that loving again does not mean loving any less.