Mrs. Lee's Rose Garden is the intensely personal story of Arlington National Cemetery's earliest history as seen through the lives of three people during the outbreak of the Civil War: Mary Ann Randolph Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee, and Montgomery C. Meigs.In the years before the war, the Arlington estate sat like an American Acropolis towering above Washington. Mary Custis Lee was known as the Rose of Arlington, a brash, young, willful, and charming young woman, she was an avid gardener who spent as much time as possible tending the numerous flowerbeds of the Arlington Mansion, along with her mother and her three daughters.Handsome and dashing, Robert E. Lee was easily the most promising soldier of his generation.

He was also a great success in the Army Corps of Engineers. His friend, Montgomery C. Meigs, who had served under Robert, was a scion of Philadelphia society, and rose to become the engineer responsible for helping to complete the capital. When the time for war arose, Lee refused the opportunity to head the Union Army. He could not draw his sword against his own state, his own people, and instead accepted a commission in the Confederate Army, pitting himself against many of his old comrades. Thus began a series of events that would ultimately pit these three against each other.