An emergency meeting of the Mortimer Square Garden Committee has been
convened to discuss a most alarming matter: Someone has been digging in
the garden and making off with buckets of dirt. Miss Angela Chesney is
sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street is to blame. But
Angela's sister, Olivia, isn't so sure. Olivia has always wondered why
the neighborhood children--the "sparrows" she sometimes watches from the
window of her house--are kept out of the private garden. Don't they have
a right to enjoy the place, too? But neither Angela nor Olivia has any
idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends
in search of good, rich earth. Still less do they imagine where their
investigation of the incident will lead them--to a struggling
restaurant, a bombed-out church, and at the heart of it all, a hidden
garden.