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  • The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation
  • Amy Amendt-Raduege
The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation, by Dinah Hazell . Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. x, 124 pp. $22.95 (hardcover) ISBN 0873388836.

One of the many delights of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is that it offers something for everyone. Historians can delve into its mythical past; economists can analyze the economies of Gondor or the Shire; sociologists can plunder its geopolitical ramifications. And, of course, anyone who loves gardening can delight in the plant life of Middle-earth, from the homey daisy to the mystical mallorn. Such is the intended audience of Dinah Hazell's The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation. Adorned with bits of medieval herblore, sprinklings of horticultural history, and the occasional venture into Tolkien criticism, the book takes a wandering journey through Middle-earth, beginning and ending in the Shire, with stops along the way to examine its indigenous plants.

The book opens by gathering a "bouquet" of flower-names found in the Shire, mostly drawn from the genealogies that appear in Appendix C of The Lord of the Rings. Since we know very little of the women who bear these names, any link between the folkloric traits of the flowers and the characters of the women named for them must necessarily be limited to speculation. When offered, those speculations are interesting, but more often than not Hazell prefers to stay within the safer territory of established lore.

The rest of the book departs from the pattern established in the first [End Page 290] chapter in favor of a more wandering path. The second chapter travels from the Shire to Mordor, but the journey is not linear: it quickly outlines the entire progression, then returns to the Shire and strolls through the same territory at a more leisurely pace. The chapter skims over the Old Forest to reach Bree in a timely fashion, then digresses into Tolkien's famous description of Edith dancing in the grove before plunging into the wilderness. Rivendell gets only a cursory glance, but the holly of Eregion is studied at some length. And so the journey continues, stopping to examine an interesting specimen here and there, traveling rapidly through terrain that interests the author less, until Frodo and Sam reach Mordor.

Chapter three backtracks again, devoting itself to the plants found in Ithilien. Here, the author sticks closer to the hobbits' path, though not without further digressions into medieval verse and a bit more about Tolkien's well-known love of trees. The fourth chapter returns to the topic of trees in more depth, spending some time examining the allegorical significance of Niggle's tree before turning its full attention to the forests of Middle-earth. Mirkwood, the Old Forest, and Fangorn are all explored at some length, but Lothlórien gets a bare two paragraphs because the author feels that the magic of Lórien cannot be captured or enriched through analysis (though Galadriel's garden was visited for three paragraphs in chapter two). Finally, we return to the devastated Shire, which Hazell reads conventionally as an indictment of industrialization and an assertion of the recuperative powers of nature. Chapter five is simply a brief expansion of this theme, using the White Tree of Gondor as a metaphor for the earth's power to regenerate itself.

Although the title of the book suggests a methodical approach to the ways in which Tolkien shaped the plants of Middle-earth by a series of deliberate choices, the book is really about the folkloric properties of real plants found in Tolkien's imaginary world. As such, it is more about herblore than botany, and more about Creation than Sub-creation. The title further implies a preoccupation with the process by which Tolkien derived imaginary plants using his knowledge of real ones, but such is not the case. The mallorn, niphredil, and athelas get almost no attention whatsoever. Ironically, these plants are not discussed precisely because they are imaginary: the author repeatedly states that she has no wish to infringe on the readers' imagined re-creations of...

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