Book Review: ‘The Peach Thief,’ by Linda Joan Smith

Mr. Layton lends her gardening books, teaches her how to care for seedlings, and demonstrates how to pack delicate grapes and pears away for the winter. “Plants need limits,” he tells her. “As do people.” Nobody has seen value in her before, and she can’t quite believe it. The head gardener looks fearsome, but “behind his hardened scar” he’s “wick, full of life, like the stone of the peach itself.”

So is Mrs. Nandi, his Indian housekeeper, who carries her own scars and sees through “Brownie” before anyone else does. (Mrs. Nandi’s presence, along with the cultivation of exotics in the earl’s garden, hints at the colonialism that built estates like Bolton Hall.)

Every garden is a secret garden, revealing wonders, if you know how to look. Smith, an author of garden books and the former editor of Country Home magazine, writes with a hands-in-the-dirt affinity for the rhythms and needs of growing things. “The Peach Thief” bursts with sensory details: the sun-warmed velvet of a ripe peach, rhubarb plants with “stalks red as rubies must be,” “the hum of life” in the “tiny scrap of green” of a cauliflower seedling.

Not even a perfect peach will satisfy the hunger for affection that gnaws at Scilla. She falls under the spell of Phineas Blake, a gardener-in-training who could charm the stars out of the sky. His smile makes Scilla feel as if the sun has “shone right on her,” as if she’s been “cold all her life, craving sun,” and hasn’t known it.

For someone who’s never been wanted by anyone, the attention proves irresistible — and dangerous. Phin takes her on midnight raids of “the glass-houses,” the greenhouses where the earl’s precious fruit grows out of season, warmed by hot-water pipes. It’s a betrayal of Mr. Layton’s trust, but when Scilla tries to resist, “that empty place inside her” starts “begging away, as starved as ever.”