Penelope Ashby has been the secretary, treasurer, show organiser, and — for four contested years — chair of her own village horticultural society in the Dorset countryside, which means she has witnessed, at close range, precisely how much genteel violence a disputed Best in Show rosette can generate. She started writing cozy mysteries, she says, largely as a safer outlet for what she was already thinking during the marrow judging.

Trained as a botanist and retired from thirty years teaching biology at a country secondary school, Penelope brings two things to the cozy shelf that most of it lacks: an unnerving working knowledge of which common garden plants are lethal, and a lifetime’s field notes on the social dynamics of a competitive village club. Her mysteries are built on the premise that has delighted her fellow gardeners and mildly alarmed her neighbours — that the English cottage garden, that symbol of peace and order, is also a very well-stocked poison cabinet in the hands of someone who knows their Latin names.

Her Foxglove Lane Mysteries follow Roz Pettifer, the iron-willed president of the Lower Wimborne Horticultural Society, who solves the village’s murders using growing calendars, greenhouse chemistry, and the simple fact that nobody thins dahlias in July. Readers can expect fair-play puzzles, a vivid and back-biting village, tea and Victoria sponge, and absolutely no gore — just excellent motive and better botany.

Penelope lives in Dorset with her husband, Gerald (who bears the produce-tent rivalries with good humour and has, she stresses, never been poisoned), a greenhouse that is her genuine pride, a plot at the allotments, and a marmalade cat named Compost. She still shows dahlias competitively, and still keeps her deductions about the other exhibitors to herself.