Plant Lady

by Minyoung Kang

Genres: General Fiction; Feminist; Women's Fiction; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

In the heart of a quiet town, a young woman tends to her plant shop, but beneath the surface of her lush, green sanctuary lies something far darker....

Will you dare to disrespect her plants?

Tucked away in the corner of a neighborhood in Dosan, South Korea, is the Plant Shop. Shop owner Yoohee has started anew, and her meticulously grown foliage thrives under her tender care. To both her customers and herself, Plant Shop is a refuge, where petunias and marigolds bloom and the air itself is like an elixir of peace.

By day, Yoohee dispenses advice on gardening, but she also finds herself offering a special service off the clock. Women who are at their wits’ end come to her about a man they hope might disappear from their lives. Pulling extra hours is taxing, but Yoohee has encountered—and dealt with—these kind of men in her own life, men who treated her (and her beloved plants) with utter disrespect. So as night falls, Yoohee trades her apron for a shovel and a hoe and disappears into her moonlit garden. There, she buries not just the remains of the day, but also the bloody remnants of a few unfortunate encounters.

As men begin to disappear…will anyone ever suspect the Plant Lady?

A highly acclaimed novel from South Korea, Plant Lady brings atmospheric tension and delicate humor to a story of obsession and misogyny that will keep you rooted right to its simmering last page.

Release date: August 4, 2026

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 208

Sample

1
Avocado

A woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat stuck her head through the shop door.

"Is anyone in?"

Hearing the jingle of the bell above the door, Yoohee, who had been crouching down with her back to the entrance, got up and placed a hand to her back.

"Welcome!" she called, pulling off her gloves.

The woman stepped inside and took a cautious look around. Her white dress, matching white shoes, and beige tote bag stood out against the surrounding greenery.

"Are you looking for anything in particular?" Yoohee asked.

The woman did not answer, but instead bent over to inspect a plant.

"Do you have something that's easy to take care of, but not too common? I used to grow asparagus, so something similarly unique would be nice." She paused. "Oh, wow, look at this. What a striking pattern!"

Stopping in front of a variegated rubber plant by the window, she reached out her hand toward a new leaf that was still unfurling. In a flash, Yoohee rushed over.

"Careful with that one, please! That's a Ficus elastica variegata-it is such a tricky plant. Just like asparagus, in fact. Here, let me show you some plants that are quick and easy to grow, as you requested."

Yoohee pointed to some herb pots, arranged neatly at the back of the shop, but the woman frowned and shook her head, making her white hat wobble.

"I'll pass," she said. "Those look a bit boring." She withdrew her hand without touching the ficus leaf.

"I used to have succulents, but they've become so common, so I switched to growing asparagus. I love all the attention it gets. People don't even realize how easily you can grow it at home."

The woman circled calmly around the shop. Keeping her expression politely neutral, Yoohee took her gloves from her pocket and put them back on. When she looked up, the woman was examining a small pot in the far corner.

"What's this? Seems rather unusual."

It was a peperomia, a radiator plant, with veined leaves that looked like a pile of mugwort rice cakes stacked together. As long as it wasn't placed in direct sunlight and the humidity was kept stable, it wasn't a difficult plant to look after. Yoohee had selected a beautiful pot to show off the lustrous leaves.

"Ah, that's a peperomia. Very high-maintenance. They're astonishingly sensitive to temperature and humidity changes, so it will need checking on every morning and night . . ."

The peperomia wasn't especially challenging to maintain, and Yoohee wouldn't have minded selling it to a keen customer at a reasonable price. Nevertheless, she deliberately steered the conversation away. It wasn't that she was reluctant to part with it, but she didn't think the woman was right for it.

Yoohee watched as the woman set the pot carefully back on the ground, giving its glossy leaves a lingering look. Then she dusted off her hands and drifted toward another shelf. After a few minutes, she swung open the door and left without another word.

Outside the shop window, she paused, apparently reluctant to walk away. Feeling the intensity of her gaze through the glass, Yoohee moved swiftly over to the peperomia to place it out of sight. The woman shrugged, put a hand on her hat, and walked away, the clicking of her heels fading into the distance.


Yoohee’s shop in Dosan-gu occupied an old two-story house. On her first visit, she’d been surprised to come across such a quiet neighborhood in bustling Sejin City. There wasn’t a single café or restaurant anywhere, but it wasn’t just made up of rows of apartment complexes either. There were several empty plots of land, and a couple of small factories and printing presses that looked to have only recently closed down. It was around this spot that Yoohee discovered the two-story house.

"I haven't had anyone else looking for a property suitable for a shop around here," the estate agent told her.

Yoohee could have guessed as much. There were no office buildings nearby, and since the street was off the main road, foot traffic was practically nonexistent.

"You won't find such a reasonable rent anywhere else," he said, adding that the owner had waived the maintenance fees to sweeten the deal.

Yoohee was sold. She took out a bank loan, and to pay for the remodeling, she sank in half of her severance pay from the company she'd recently resigned from after six years. During the two-month renovation process, she put together the admin to register her business. And because rent in the area was so cheap, she decided to move to the neighborhood, too, intoxicated by the idea of uprooting her home and starting everything afresh.

When opening day came, her heart thrummed with excitement. But it would be true to say that for the first eight weeks, she barely covered costs. She'd visit the flower market at daybreak to haggle over prices, and then, for the next few hours, she would sit alone in her shop in total silence.

Her former colleagues and a few friends from her university days dropped by and showered her with advice.

"Don't you think the decor is too sophisticated for a small town like this?"

"No one's going to buy anything when you're selling at these prices."

Several people she knew thought she'd named the shop badly-"What's with 'Plant Shop'?!"-and suggested changing it to something catchier and more elegant. Yoohee refused to budge on that. She was convinced that, with time, customers would begin to remember her shop, simple as the name might be.

She did take up their other nuggets of advice and tried moving the furniture around, changing up the interior for a more relaxed vibe. She lowered her prices slightly and browsed the websites and socials of popular plant shops to get some marketing inspiration, but none of this made much difference.

In the end, it was a stroke of good fortune that turned Yoohee's business around: a development that nobody in the neighborhood could have predicted.

The commercial district opposite Dosan Market Station was reaching the saturation point, and new businesses were starting to spill over into neighboring areas. A couple of cafés had even sprung up toward the edge of town, creating more foot traffic past her shop. Moreover, it was the only plant shop in the entire district-a unique one, too, since it was inside a remodeled historic house. Content creators, always on alert for the newest hotspots, started to notice it. And as more and more influencers crowded in and posted videos, Plant Shop quickly became one of Sejin City's "must-visit" places.


Yoohee did not believe in fate.

It was true that plants left in poor soil or in the wrong sort of climate would inevitably wilt and die, but she considered it her calling to offer them the most comfortable environment possible in which to thrive. Whenever any plant looked unwell, whether it was a case of rotting roots from overwatering, or leaf loss owing to a lack of sunlight, she easily diagnosed the problem and solved it like a puzzle.

"Humans are just like plants," she often told herself. With a little attention and tenderness, you could nudge them back onto the right track. No one was ever rotten to the core and beyond rescuing. Or, at least, this was what she'd always wanted to believe. But over time, her conviction had begun to weaken.

And it always had to do with men.

When they first approached her, they always appeared so friendly, so modest. So when things went wrong, Yoohee couldn't help but wonder if it was her fault. Whenever she began to feel down on herself, she'd think about her plants: the camellia she'd accidentally left outside in the rain, the succulents she hadn't watered correctly, the peonies that had lost their petals after she'd shifted their pot into sunlight. By the time these plants showed symptoms, it was already too late to save them. But if she was vigilant, she could pick up any untoward signs early, and once she did, she could bring them back from the brink of death.

And yet-even though she tried to manage each relationship like a plant, with the same sensitivity and understanding-every boyfriend she'd ever gone out with had driven her to the edge. Over time, Yoohee became like a computer that had lost its ability to reboot. Not even a full performance optimization service and the latest antivirus technology could fix anything.

It was just around the time her business had begun to pick up, as she was settling into a manageable routine, that she met Hoyoung-the plant shop's first male customer.


Hoyoung, who worked at a consulting company, had spent the past week behind his desk, pulling his hair out. A key client of his, a name-brand bicycle manufacturer looking to open a retail flagship store, had sought out his company to produce a unique and creative store design and advertising campaign. Hoyoung had eagerly bagged the project, but now he was struggling to come up with ideas.

Plants! The thought struck him one day as he was strolling through a park. Greenery and scenes of nature would offer a striking contrast to all the metallic hardware. What if he turned the bicycle shop into a green forest? He floated the idea at an internal meeting, but it was shot down immediately. Hoyoung stubbornly dug his heels in and developed the idea a little more, but it still wasn't enough to get a clear go-ahead. The first meeting with the bicycle manufacturer was approaching, and he was getting more and more nervous. He wasn't really prepared at all; he didn't want to admit it, but he knew next to nothing about plants.

The afternoon before the meeting, he sat alone at his desk. His slides were still blank. In desperation, he typed random keywords into the internet search bar, willing a single idea to come to him. One search result caught his eye-Plant Shop: Gardening under one roof. At this point, Hoyoung was grasping at straws, so he hailed a taxi and sped over.

When the taxi finally reached its destination, he was surprised at how far he had traveled. He sat for a moment, looking out the window. In the shop's front garden, a woman was squatting down to rearrange some flowerpots, moving them around in order of size. After a few moments, he got out, straightened his jacket, and walked over to her, glancing around uncertainly at the residential street. The woman looked up, and his gaze met hers.

She stood to greet him.

"Oh, hello. I'm Choi Yoohee. You called an hour ago, didn't you?"

He gave her his name and followed her up the steps, which looked recently swept and washed. The moment he stepped through the door, he felt as if he had stumbled into a thick fairy-tale forest. He paused to take it all in.

Yoohee observed him silently.

After a moment, Hoyoung exhaled a long breath. "Wow," he said.

"Don't mind the mess, I'm just repotting some plants," said Yoohee, bringing over two folding chairs that had been leaning by the wall. Hoyoung hitched up his suit pants and sat down. He took a tablet out of his briefcase. Yoohee looked on in silence, catching a glimpse of his lock screen: a selfie against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower.

"I know we've discussed what you need on the phone. Can I help you with anything else?"

"Nope. If you can even help me out with this, that'll be enough. I'm actually in a rush. I came down here because you mentioned that you could offer advice on everything to do with plants. Here, could you have a look at this and give me your thoughts? I have to get it ready by tomorrow, so . . ."

Hoyoung passed Yoohee the tablet. On the screen was the proposal he'd spent the entire week on. Yoohee scrolled through, noting several placeholders and a lot of blank space.

By a stroke of luck, Yoohee had recently dropped into a bicycle shop at Dosan Market to have her bike chain repaired. Recalling the layout of that shop, she began suggesting plant varieties that would complement its vibe, describing each one in detail and giving instructions on how to care for them. Hoyoung scrawled speedily, jotting down everything she said on his notepad.

Their conversation, mostly one-sided, stretched easily into the night.

When Hoyoung presented his slides the next day, almost nothing from his original bare-bones plan remained. The client adored everything about it and gave him an immediate green light. Overwhelmed with relief and gesticulating wildly, Hoyoung then highly recommended the services of Yoohee's plant shop, at the same time taking credit for his excellent taste and insisting that he should be the one to coordinate with the owner.

Having acquired a name-brand corporate client on top of her growing private customer base, Yoohee started to find herself extremely busy. Every Tuesday and Thursday, she and Hoyoung met after work to discuss the project. By the time opening day for the flagship bicycle shop arrived, they were getting to know each other extremely well.

As they were making their final selection of plants, Hoyoung gave Yoohee a lingering pat on her back.

"Trust me, this will be the star project in your portfolio. Your big break. Aren't you glad I found you? If you can leverage this, it will be a terrific leap forward for your shop. Believe me."

By now, business had improved even more. Yoohee was starting to welcome a handful of regulars-mainly young women-who appreciated how she had designed the shop's decor and put together the plant catalog to reflect the changing seasons. It especially thrilled her when someone left an online review likening her to "a lone wolf staying loyal to its modest environment." When she started an Instagram account for the shop, many visitors tagged her in their posts, and in no time, her follower count grew into the thousands.


A few weeks after the opening of the bicycle shop, Hoyoung and Yoohee started seeing each other. Hoyoung’s constant refrain was to remind her that it was all thanks to him that her shop was doing so well. It was practically a miracle, he insisted, given the obscurity of its location.

Gradually, Hoyoung began to behave as though the shop was in fact his. One day, Yoohee chanced upon a copy of his résumé in the glove compartment of his car, and while she raised an eyebrow at his position-Head of Branding, Plant Shop-she decided to let it slide. But soon, he was lecturing her on how to run things.

"It's time for a rebrand," he said.

Yoohee flinched but kept quiet.

Now that they were a couple, and even though he had come on to her pretty strong from the start, she wanted to be an understanding girlfriend. It wouldn't do to nitpick every little thing.