Barbara watches her daughter Allison, who is home from college for the summer, photographing Ruth Jones in the west Kentucky orchard Ruth and Barbara own together. Ruth is explaining the cross-pollination process between the apricot tree and peach tree to Allison. Ruth tells Allison about the different kinds of fruit trees and Barbara remembers planting the trees and being told by a neighbor that they wouldn’t grow and, despite these odds, they did.  

Allison jokes to Barbara, a divorcee, and Ruth, a widower, that they sit in their garden all day instead of going out to meet men. This suggestion seems absurd to them. They work together in a school they built. Allison, who works at McDonald’s when she’s home, is the same age as Ruth’s daughter was when she passed. Ruth stays up until she comes home from work at midnight to make sure she is safe.

Ruth and Barbara had bought the house together after they both lost their partners. Barbara took to the gardens while Ruth rescued the house from its decaying state. When the previous owner left the house, he did a poor job of cleaning up and left dead bumblebees in one of the closets. One day after they moved in, Ruth discovered a bumblebee in between the window and the storm pane and after that incident the pair found more bees, which Barbara rescued.

Since coming home from college, Barbara notices that Allison is quite different, smoking cigarettes and reading thick novels. Allison tells her mother that she saw Ruth going through her belongings and Barbara defends her, saying she’s still shaken up from losing her husband and child in a car crash. Allison collects things she finds on the farm — a cracked sparrow egg, a butterfly wing, a cocoon — in a cigar box spray-painted gold. Ruth talks to Allison about her grief and remembers her lost family. She explains that her daughter was in a coma for a week and she held out hope, reading stories to her in the hospital. She repeatedly references the fact that the truck that collided with her family’s was full of turnips and that when they crashed the turnips went everywhere.

As Barbara and Ruth garden together, Ruth continues to talk about the turnips and Barbara tries to change the subject to the nectarines they are tending to. As Ruth interrupts about the turnips again, they are suddenly distracted by Allison’s screams as she runs away from a bee. Barbara crushes the bee into the back of Allison’s head and says that her perfume was attracting it. Barbara rubs tobacco shreds on the stings on Allison’s head. Ruth watches on in envy as Barbara comforts her daughter.

After the bee sting, a rainstorm floods the garden’s crops and brings out a bad smell in the house. Allison receives a letter from her father, asking her to come stay with him and tells the women that she’s dropping out of school for a year to work in Lexington, more than 200 miles away. Ruth and Barbara get into an argument about this decision, with Ruth telling Barbara to stop her and Barbara saying it’s Allison’s decision to make.

Later, in the bathroom, Allison asks her mother the exact moment she stopped loving her father. Barbara says it was the day she asked him to go on a picnic with her and he made an excuse. Allison tells Barbara that she thinks Ruth is stealing some of her belongings and asks what she will do with Ruth if Barbara ever decides to remarry. When Barbara resists the urge later that night to over-mother both Ruth and Allison, she realizes that she is tending to too many gardens. In another rainstorm the next day, the bridge outside their house is swept away and they find themselves unable to leave the farm for the day. Barbara walks around the garden and views it with fresh eyes, as though she has never seen it before.

When the sun emerges, so do the bumblebees. Allison starts to clean out the attic and finds a box of old rags from the previous owners that Ruth tells her to burn, which she does.