Narvel Roth is a meticulous horticulturist who is devoted to tending the grounds of a beautiful estate and pandering to his employer, the wealthy dowager Mrs. Haverhill. When she demands that he take on her wayward and troubled great niece, it unlocks dark secrets from a buried violent past.

Dr. Evan Cooper is the ideal match on paper and according to her grandmother, Rose Durham and friends, including an equally pushy wedding planner, for florist Laurel Haverford, who fears to be the last of her generation to get married. Yet she keeps dragging her heels after meeting cocky Stephen Banks, who is all wrong on paper but makes her heart leap by pre chemistry.

The film is set during the period of growing influence of the Indian independence movement in the British Raj. It begins with the arrival in India of a British woman, Miss Adela Quested (Judy Davis), who is joining her fiancé, a city magistrate named Ronny Heaslop (Nigel Havers). She and Ronny’s mother, Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), befriend an Indian doctor, Aziz H. Ahmed (Victor Banerjee).