Maggie Lawson's Garden of Dreams

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.