Tolkien during World War I
I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, as I do every four years. You only get to read it so many times before you die, and I have determined four years is the ideal interval for me. As always, I am struck by what a fine botanist Tolkien was for a man with a Ph.D. in linguistics.
South and west [Ithilien] looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Duath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away. Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk* and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.
Wow. Say it aloud: “deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.”
Tolkien spent lots of time exploring bog and field in his childhood, and his mother Mabel taught him botany,
and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants.
I, too, spent many long hours as a three-, four- and five-year-old exploring the hills, fields, and streams around my birthplace in southeast Tennessee, where wild blueberries grew next to waterfall-fed pools and the iron-oxide dirt stained my socks pink to the eternal chagrin of my mother. Take-home lesson: If you have children, don’t be a paranoid helicopter parent. To the extent possible, live near natural areas, and let your children build their imagination and love of nature by exploring them on their own.
In any case, I want to take a closer look at one plant Tolkien mentions. Here’s another excerpt from the text just before the last passage:
The long journey from Rivendell had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.
Observe: “larches were green-fingered.” You may be tempted to think larches are some sort of broadleaf shrub or tree. You’d be wrong. Larches (genus Larix) are a very unusual thing: a deciduous conifer. That’s right — though they are firmly ensconced in the ancient and aristocratic Pine Family, their needles turn gold or brown and drop every autumn, and new green needles take their place every spring.
Browning larch trees in autumn near the Dolomites in Italy. http://www.flickr.com/photos/krossbow/ / CC BY 2.0
Another interesting thing about larches is their needles grow in whorls. Observe:
Male cones of the larch near needle-whorls.
For those of you who may be wondering how to recognize this tree from quite a long way away, here’s a helpful instructional film:
Alas. None of the American larches — Tamarack, Western, or Subalpine — grow in Colorado, so I will not be recognizing them from near or far anytime soon.
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*A plant’s “goodness” or “badness” depends on the context. Tamarisk, which Tolkien mentions in the first passage in a scene intended to evoke beauty and goodness, is also called salt cedar in the United States, and is an imported cone-bearing shrub that has caused endless migraines for land managers across the west. Planted for erosion control by the millions during the Great Depression, it has proceeded to invade the banks of most waterways, siphoning billions of gallons of precious western water out through the tiny openings, or stomata, of its leaves to be wasted in the air and crowding native plants like willows and cottonwoods out of their habitats. In Eurasia, it’s a natural part of the landscape.
Salt cedar, by the way, is not actually a cedar but a flowering plant. It just looks like a cedar. Pesky common names!
