The title of the book is a quote from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate: / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer's lease hath all too short a date; [...] Pop and Ma Larkin and their many children take joy in nature, each other's company, and almost constant feasts.

In the first novella, Pop, Ma, and Mariette Larkin attempt to beguile Cedric Charlton, a timid and naive tax inspector, into abandoning his investigation of their finances.

Their ultimate goal is for Mariette, who is secretly pregnant at the age of seventeen, to marry "Charley" and thus provide a father for her baby.

ITV produced a television series of the novel, and its sequels plus additional original storylines, The Darling Buds of May, which ran from 1991 to 1993.