Chapter 3: Six Gardens
By Wednesday morning, Mark had learned that talking to his neighbors was more exhausting than planting an entire yard.
He started with Bernard and Elise Moreno, a retired couple who lived at the far end of the six-house row.
Their front garden held lavender, rosemary, and a cracked stone birdbath.
Elise remembered June Bellweather as a stubborn woman who wore men’s work boots and gave away cuttings in coffee cans.
“She could grow a rose from a complaint,” Elise said.
Bernard laughed until Mark showed him the Crownleaf advertisement.
His smile disappeared.
“That’s June’s color.”
“Red flowers are fairly common,
” Mark said.
“Not those.”
Bernard fetched an old biscuit tin from the garage.
Inside were photographs of neighbors gathered beside flowering plants under a hand-painted banner.
They were celebrating the Bellweather Garden Walk.
In one picture Diane, much younger, held a watering can beside June.
“Diane organized those walks for years,” Elise said.
“She stopped inviting people after June moved away.”
“Why did June leave?”
Elise shrugged.
“Her sister became ill, and June went to help.”
“Did anyone take over the collection?”
Bernard touched the edge of the photograph.
“We thought Diane had.”
The next house belonged to Omar Velez,
a paramedic whose teenage daughter Lucia had inherited his love of fixing broken things.
Omar had found an old watering schedule nailed inside his garage when he bought the house.
He showed Mark a narrow metal rack with faded names stamped into six brackets.
“I thought the previous owner had labeled a tool collection,” Omar said.
“Each bracket has a different number.”
Priya joined them and examined the marks.
“These aren’t tool labels.”
“Then what are they?” Lucia asked.
“They might correspond to plant lines from June’s breeding records.”
Lucia had never heard of June, but she liked the mystery immediately.
“Does that mean my garden might have a plant nobody sells anymore?”
“Maybe,” Priya said.
“It also means we should avoid pulling up anything unusual before we identify it.”
They crossed to the fourth house, where Nate Sullivan worked nights at a bread factory.
Nate opened the door in slippers and listened while holding a mug of coffee.
“I pulled out a bunch of red flowers last spring,” he admitted.
“They looked scraggly.”
Priya asked whether he had saved any roots or cuttings.
“I tossed the stems behind the compost bin.”
They went to look.
A few new shoots had emerged from a patch of loose soil.
Priya crouched and photographed the leaves without removing anything.
“This plant is alive.”
Nate blinked.
“After a whole winter?”
“Many salvias can come back from the base in a mild climate.”
He looked suddenly embarrassed.
“I was going to build a shelf there.”
“Then I’m glad we visited before you did,” Mark said.
The fifth house stood empty while its owner, Harper Wynn, worked out of state.
Mark called the number Harper had left with the neighborhood contact group.
She remembered a red plant beside her back fence and gave permission for Priya to look at it with her landscaper present.
By late afternoon, they had identified four promising plants or root crowns across the six lots.
The collection was not neatly preserved, but it was not entirely gone.
Diane had refused to join the search.
She watched from her porch while the neighbors compared photographs and argued over leaf shapes.
At five, a silver SUV pulled up beside her house.
Nolan Pike climbed out wearing an expensive jacket and carrying a slim sample case.
Mark noticed Diane grip the porch rail.
Pike glanced toward the flower beds before walking to her door.
Their conversation began quietly.
It became loud enough for Mark to hear when Diane said,
“You promised not to bring anyone here.”
Pike lowered his voice.
“We have a schedule, Diane.”
“Not anymore.”
“Then you should consider what happens when people discover your part in it.”
Diane went still.
Pike returned to his SUV and drove away.
Mark crossed the street after the vehicle turned the corner.
“What did he mean?” Mark asked.
“It means you have made trouble for people who can afford better lawyers than you.”
“Did you give him the plants?”
Diane looked at Mark for a long moment.
“I did something worse.”
She opened her front door and stepped inside.
For the first time,
she left the door open for him to follow.
Chapter 4: The First Cutting
Diane’s sitting room contained more plants than furniture.
Cuttings rooted in glass jars along the windowsill, and ceramic pots occupied nearly every square foot near the light.
She led Mark past them to a cabinet filled with seed packets and carefully labeled envelopes.
He noticed that none of the labels matched the Crownleaf brand.
“June trusted me with the first successful cutting,” Diane said.
She opened a small drawer and lifted out a brittle photograph.
June Bellweather stood beside a younger Diane, both women holding a pot of red flowers.
“Why did you never tell anyone?” Mark asked.
“I told people plenty.”
“You threatened to call the police when I planted flowers.”
“I know what I did today.”
Diane sat down heavily.
“I need you to hear what happened before you decide what sort of woman I am.”
Mark remained standing.
He had spent the morning defending his right to put plants in the ground, and he did not owe Diane comfort.
But he did want an answer.
Diane explained that June had developed several flowering lines, not one finished commercial variety.
The plants in the six front gardens were living experiments.
Some bloomed early, some resisted mildew, and one produced unusually intense color during hot weather.
Crownleaf had bought a regional nursery eight years earlier.
Pike was then a junior buyer tasked with acquiring rare local varieties.
He visited Diane after seeing an old Garden Walk photograph online.
“He said he wanted to preserve June’s work,” Diane said.
“I thought he meant it.”
She gave him a few unrooted cuttings after he promised to help finance a community demonstration bed.
He returned with a contract she did not fully understand.
Diane signed a limited research access agreement covering the material she personally contributed.
The contract did not grant ownership of June’s breeding work or anyone else’s plants.
Pike nevertheless began acting as if the entire collection belonged to Crownleaf.
Diane saw branded pots in a trade catalog two years later.
“I complained,” she said.
“Their lawyer sent me a letter explaining that my contribution had become part of a proprietary development program.”
“Did you tell June?”
Diane shook her head.
“June had died by then.”
“Did you tell the other neighbors?”
“I was ashamed.”
Mark studied the cabinet.
“So you buried the problem.”
“I stopped the Garden Walk because every new visitor made it more likely that Pike would learn which plants survived.
”
“He already knew the neighborhood.”
“He didn’t know where every line was.”
Diane explained that she had quietly moved cuttings when houses changed owners.
She had watered neglected plants, replaced dying stems, and argued with landscapers who threatened to remove unfamiliar flowers.
“That doesn’t give you the right to control our yards,” Mark said.
“I know.”
Her admission sounded harder than any accusation he could have made.
“Why did you call 911?”
Diane held up a folded printed schedule.
Pike had planned to arrive Friday morning with a mobile display crew to photograph the old collection.
He wanted images showing the plants as neglected relics of an abandoned experiment.
Diane feared Mark’s fresh bed would expose the location of the most valuable surviving root crown.
She had believed a police incident might frighten him into abandoning the garden before Pike arrived.
“You could have warned me,” Mark said.
“You were new, and I didn’t trust you.”
“You accused me of threatening you.”
Diane lowered her eyes.
“I should not have said that.”
Mark put the photograph on the table.
“What happens Friday?”
“Pike plans to introduce Scarlet Star at a regional garden showcase.”
“Does he need this street?”
“He needs a convincing story.”
Diane pointed at June’s photograph.
“He wants the audience to believe his company created a breakthrough from nothing.”
Mark looked closely at the blooms in the image.
They were brilliant red, but the leaves were speckled and one flowering stem leaned sideways.
June’s plant was imperfect, alive, and recognizably hers.
The polished Crownleaf advertisement showed a cleaner version of the same shape.
“Then we should find out what he actually has,” Mark said.
Diane lifted her head.
“You would help after what I did?”
“I’m not helping you escape responsibility.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because June’s work deserves a better ending than a fight over twelve flowers.”
Chapter 5: The Sample Case
Mark went home with a photocopy of Diane’s research agreement and an uncomfortable collection of questions.
The agreement contained only two pages, and its narrow language did not match Pike’s confident statements.
He was no lawyer, and he refused to pretend otherwise.
He called the county agricultural extension office instead.
An adviser named Simone Price listened patiently before explaining what her office could and could not verify.
“We can help identify plants and document their history,” she said.
“We cannot determine legal ownership of a cultivar from a telephone description.”
Mark thanked her for the distinction.
She offered to visit the next day with a plant pathologist named Felix Arora.
“I would rather have someone tell me what we don’t know than sell me certainty,” Mark said.
Simone laughed.
“Then you’ve called the right place.”
At the warehouse, Mark spent the evening shift checking inventories while his assistant manager tried to talk him into changing his weekend plans.
“I heard you have a flower scandal,” Tessa said.
“Apparently that’s what passes for entertainment on my street.”
“You should charge admission.”
“I’d settle for getting my Saturday back.”
A delivery driver interrupted with a damaged shipment, and Mark returned to practical problems he could actually solve.
Yet he kept thinking about Diane’s hands as she held June’s photograph.
They had trembled when she spoke about the first cutting.
They had not trembled when she called 911.
The contrast bothered him.
The next morning, Simone and Felix arrived in a small county vehicle with clean tools and a portable shade tent.
Priya met them on the sidewalk beside Mark’s red flower bed.
Nate brought coffee, and Lucia carried a notebook for recording observations.
Felix made one rule before examining anything.
“We will not take samples from a private yard without the owner’s consent.”
Nate immediately offered access to his compost pile.
Harper joined by video call while her landscaper stood beside the fence.
Diane emerged from her porch only after Elise waved her over.
Felix examined the leaves and stems from the plants still growing in each yard.
He explained that appearance alone could not establish genetic identity.
Plants grown under different conditions could look different even when they shared a parent.
Conversely, unrelated plants could produce similar red blooms.
Simone recorded oral histories from Bernard and Elise while Priya organized the old photographs by date.
The six deeds became a useful historical guide, but nobody presented them as proof of scientific authorship.
Diane surprised everyone by volunteering her oldest surviving plant for a carefully documented cutting.
“June called this one Lantern,” she said.
Felix looked at its narrow leaves.
“Do you know why?”
“It was the first one that stayed bright after sunset made the other reds look brown.”
Priya smiled at the poetic description.
Felix wrote the nickname down without treating it as a laboratory measurement.
By midday, they had located five distinct clusters of surviving plants and one empty bed where a line had apparently disappeared.
The empty bed belonged to Bernard and Elise.
Elise remembered clearing it after a fungus outbreak eleven years earlier.
“We thought the plant was gone,” she said.
Diane frowned.
“I took a cutting before you dug it out.”
“You never told us.”
“I kept forgetting that telling people mattered as much as keeping plants alive.”
Mark looked away before Diane could see his expression.
He was not yet ready to praise her for an admission that had taken decades.
At two o’clock, Nolan Pike returned.
His SUV stopped beside Mark’s driveway, and a second vehicle parked behind him.
A young woman in a Crownleaf polo shirt stepped out carrying a camera case.
Pike opened the passenger door and removed his slim sample case.
“What a charming gathering,” he said.
“We’re conducting a county extension visit,” Simone replied.
“Then you’ve heard the exciting news about our Scarlet Star line.”
Felix said nothing.
Pike turned toward Mark.
“I believe we spoke by phone.”
“Briefly.”
“I thought you might appreciate our offer to purchase a few ordinary plants from your strip.”
“Which ordinary plants?”
Pike smiled.
“The ones your neighbors have been fussing over.”
“You’d need to ask their owners.”
The photographer raised her camera toward Priya’s garden.
Priya stepped forward.
“Please do not photograph my yard for commercial use.”
The woman immediately lowered the camera.
Pike’s smile tightened.
“We’re documenting regional horticultural history.”
“Then you can begin by speaking to the people who grew it,” Simone said.
Pike placed the sample case on Mark’s garden wall.
He opened it to reveal a white plastic tray holding six tiny plants in labeled pots.
Each bore a glossy red tag reading CROWNLEAF SCARLET STAR.
“Our finished product will be available nationally by spring,” he announced.
Diane stared at the tray.
“Where did you get those cuttings?”
“From our authorized propagation program.”
“Those are not the same six lines I gave you.”
Pike closed the case partway.
“I wouldn’t expect you to remember every sample after so many years.”
Diane pointed to the third pot.
“That leaf curls toward the stem on hot days.”
“Many plants do that.”
“And its young growth has a pale stripe that disappears when it matures.”
Felix leaned closer without touching the pot.
“That is an interesting observation.”
Pike snapped the case shut.
“We’ll continue this discussion at Friday’s preview.”
He turned and walked toward the SUV.
The photographer lingered beside the sidewalk.
When Pike was far enough away, she whispered to Mark, “I didn’t know anyone lived here.”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“He said the original gardens had been cleared years ago.”
She handed him an ordinary business card with her first name, Keira, printed beneath the company logo.
“If you want to know what the invitation says, call me before tonight.”
She hurried after Pike before anyone could question her further.
