Amish widow Sarah Yoder is doing her best to raise her teenaged son and stepson and provide a home where family and members of her Old Order Amish church can find fellowship and friendship. But it's getting more and more difficult to make ends meet, until the local Dokterfraa suggests that Sarah also becomes an herbal healer, using the plants she grows in her garden. But Sarah is uncertain if caring for others will take her away from the place where she believes God wants her. It appears that her family is already splintering. Her stepson Simon wants to move out west with his cousin to find work. And her youngest, Caleb, is spending far too much time over at the tumbledown home of Henry Byler, who left the church long ago. Henry has inherited the family farm and has -returned under protest - never suspecting that God has been waiting there for him.

When Sarah takes her first case, she soon discovers that the heart can be scarred as deeply as the body. As she compiles her herbs, she waits for God to do his healing work in a man who rues a harsh decision, in a lonely prodigal who has lost everything, and maybe even in a herbalist-in-training who firmly believes she will never love again.