When was it that I first heard of the grass harp? Long before that autumn when we lived in the Paternoster tree, so in an earlier autumn, and of course it was Dolly who told me about it. Eleven-year-old Collin comes to live with his eccentric aunts Verena and Dolly in a Southern town after the death of his parents. Verena is a domineering realist, while Dolly is a dreamer who brews medicine from wild herbs with her black friend Catherine. A conflict arises between the aunts when Verena senses a lucrative opportunity in Dolly's collecting passion and wants to commercialize it. To defend her personal happiness from her sister, Dolly, along with Collin and Catherine, takes refuge in a treehouse. Verena, the sheriff, and the town's dignitaries try to force the three runaways back into reality, down from the tree. In the end.