If Grosse Pointe Garden Society was a flower, it would be a dahlia. According to Ben Rappaport, who plays Brett—a core member of the high-society garden club the show revolves around and best friend of main character Alice (AnnaSophia Robb)—it’s complex, just like his character.

“ChatGPT tells me that my flower is a dahlia, and dahlias are complicated,” he says. “They’re like a sort of symbol of creativity. They come in many different colors. And I think that the show is complicated; it’s colorful. There’s a lot of brightness, but there’s a lot of darkness. It’s kind of all these things.”

Grosse Pointe Garden Society: What’s Buried Beneath the Surface

The new NBC series, which premiered Feb. 23, opens with Brett, Alice, Catherine (Aja Naomi King), and Birdie (Melissa Fumero) standing over a grave they dug themselves. You quickly learn this club isn’t just about growing roses and winning competitions. As the episodes unfold, you learn more and more about the dark corners of their rich suburb, the messy relationships, and how it could all lead to murder.

While the focus is on the drama and covered-up crime, it’s the garden that ties the whole show together. The intertwined metaphors and analogies about pests and plants are aimed at seasoned and novice gardeners alike—and if you’re part of a garden club (or club of any kind), you’ll probably appreciate the different characters that come with it.

“I think this whole theme of: A garden is beautiful, and there’s all these lush, gorgeous flowers, but under that is dirt, rot, a kind of ugliness—and that’s sort of the show,” Fumero says. “You know, people that put on these sort of personas or are presenting a certain version of themselves to society or to their spouses, and it’s not the whole story. It’s not everything that’s going on, and that gets uncovered more and more as the season goes along.”

The Characters

The character Birdie is the least enthusiastic about actual gardening—she’s forced to join the club after driving her car into the community fountain—but she brings her own special (and scheming) touch to the group, rolling up to volunteer in her expensive heels, and it makes the show so fun to watch.

Meanwhile, Brett is the opposite. “I’d say his least favorite part is probably Birdie’s favorite part, which is the social aspect of it,” Rappaport says. “I think that he sees through a lot of the BS and a lot of the social politics that make up this—it’s sort of like the microcosm of the highest society of Grosse Pointe. And that’s not something that Brett really participates in, being the kid from the working class, the kid from the other side of the tracks.”

And Catherine couldn’t be more different from the chaotic personalities of Brett and Birdie. At least on the surface, she seemingly has it all together. Except she’s actually having an affair with her co-worker and her perfect reputation as PTA president and leader in the garden club is faltering. 

“Yes, she loves the garden and the club,” King says. “But I feel like, for her, it’s a bit of a power thing in the community, to be vice president of the garden club, to help it win competitions. It’s more about status than anything else. And you might start to track, like, how much is Catherine actually planting, and how much is she delegating? Because delegating—she knows what she’s good at.”

And then there’s Alice: After finding out her dog has been tragically killed, she begins to spiral (understandably so), and her already unstable relationship with her husband steadily gets rockier. Comparing her character to a geranium in the first episode, she describes feeling like a wildflower planted somewhere it’s not allowed to grow freely (aka their affluent Detroit suburb).

The Garden

With these characters, there’s something for everyone—but even if you’re not sucked in by the drama, it’s worth sticking around for the beauty of the set’s garden. It’s lush and sprawling, with colorful flowers and greenery everywhere you look. Created by a special greens department, the space is a “true-to-scale courtyard made up of a combination of real plants and faux silk flowers,” according to NBC Insider, and Robb says there was a lot of cabbage, kale, and sturdy vegetation in the mix. Filming took place across all seasons and the garden is used as a way to show time is passing, so there was a lot of switching it up.

“Our garden department—they’re amazing because the temperatures we’ve gotten in Atlanta have been so brutally cold,” King says. 

“It’s honestly a really good lesson in seeing what plants do thrive,” Robb adds. “We’ll be filming a scene—we jump around in time a lot, so there’ll be one episode where the garden is thriving, and then it has to be winter, and so they have to remove all of the plants and then put them back in.”

As for the gardening skills of the cast themselves: No one claims to be a professional, but they’ve all dug into it a bit, and the admiration is clear. Robb has kept an amaryllis that she gave her husband for Valentine’s Day alive for eight years (she calls it a “love plant”); King says she loves walking through a garden; and Rappaport and Fumero both have their moms to look up to. Fumero calls hers an amazing gardener, recalling the “incredible vegetable garden” and “symphony of flowers” she’s grown. Rappaport’s mother, fittingly, is the event planner of her garden club. 

“She’s basically the Catherine of her garden club in Massachusetts,” he says. “But for me, I have very little experience keeping plants alive. When I lived in LA, I grew on my little balcony tomatoes and basil, and the basil ended up tasting like licorice, so it didn’t work out that great. And I also had a succulent, which is supposed to be really easy to keep alive. I couldn’t even do that.”

Grosse Pointe Garden Society airs every Sunday on NBC at 10/9c, and you can stream the episodes on Peacock as they release.