Some Thoughts on Hobbit Garden Plants

For my first real post on this blog, it feels right and proper to start where Tolkien starts: the Shire, and specifically, its gardens. When we first meet Bilbo in The Hobbit, he is outside his front door having a leisurely smoke; Frodo’s journey likewise starts from Bag-End, and much of his introduction to his quest is set against the sound of Sam working in the garden. While the gardens are not always described in quite as much detail as the natural landscapes we encounter, the plants that Tolkien does describe in hobbit gardens are really interesting for what they can tell us about the Shire, its inhabitants, and how Tolkien thought of them.

A quick read-through of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings gives us the following list of garden plants. These either mentioned specifically or included as given names for hobbits (often only as passing references in family trees), but crucially, they are all plants that are not native to Britain:

• Nasturtium
• Sunflower
• Potato
• Laburnum
• Camellia
• Lobelia
• Rose
• Peony
• Pansy
• Lily
• Mimosa

In the real world, these plants were all introduced to this country, i.e., they are not found in the wild unless they have been introduced. Some originate from the 16th century European conquests of the Americas, like nasturtiums, sunflowers, lobelias, and potatoes, while others came from further east, like peonies and camellias, introduced from China in the 19th century. They are all products of empire, of colonialism, of the historic obsession with the “exotic”. Plant-hunting expeditions were commissioned and organised for the explicit purpose of finding new plants for English people to grow in their gardens, providing us with hundreds of plants that remain immensely popular with gardeners today. Such garden staples as hydrangeas, wisterias, peonies, and roses all came from these missions, making the “typical” English cottage garden more of a botanical world tour in miniature.

Authors like Walter and Graham Judd point out that species of the plants from these lists do grow natively in Europe and even Britain. One example of this is laburnums, which are native to southern Europe but crucially, not to Britain, and likewise, Lobelia urens has been recorded in the wild in a few southern regions of Britain. However, given that the names listed above have in common their use as garden plants, I find it more interesting to accept that Tolkien’s hobbit gardens may contain a goodly proportion of non-native plants. “Native” vs. “non-native” can be a somewhat loaded distinction among plantspeople of all stripes, though that’s not an argument I wish to go into here. Instead, I find it interesting that, when Tolkien is constructing his image of what the Shire looks like, he chooses to do so by invoking these plants.

In his letters, Tolkien twice refers, in letters 178 and 181, to his experience growing up in the era of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1897) and the fact that he used “such life as I know” to model the Shire on a Warwickshire village from that time. The plants we’re discussing here largely fit into that model of a village cottage garden, at a time when introduced plants were becoming increasingly popular in gardens. With the one exception of tobacco, which will merit a post or two of its own in due course, there is no sense that the plants in the gardens of the Shire came from anywhere - they are just taken for granted as a perfectly normal feature of everyday life.

But the Shire is, if nothing else, very un-foreign in its attitudes and position. There is, among many hobbits, a deep suspicion of the world outside and those who explored it. We can see that from Bilbo’s loss of his neighbours’ respect on his return from Erebor and the dismissive tone of the gossipers in The Green Dragon at the start of the The Lord of the Rings when anyone dares refer to greater stories than their own. Even after the restoration of the Kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor, Aragorn declares the Shire off limits to all “big people”, including himself. Thus we end up, somewhat paradoxically, with the homely and insular culture of hobbits containing plants from the most far-flung places in the real world.

However, the history of plant “discovery” and introduction to the gardens of Britain very consciously engaged in the erasure of existing names and histories of plants, re-naming them as they re-homed them. As Jamaica Kincaid points out, “the plants from far away, like the people far away, had no names, so they could be given names” (My Garden (Book), p. 91). This is a mainstay of botanical colonialism, and is why you think you’ve never heard of chimalacatl or cempoalxóchitl (Indigenous Nahuatl names for sunflowers and marigolds respectively). It suddenly seems a lot less strange for hobbits to have all of these foreign plants in their gardens: Tolkien is not just basing the Shire on his Victorian village in a horticultural sense, but also a cultural one. They take the gardens and their plants for granted, choosing not to look beyond the borders of their own land, not considering that their flowers could have any other home than the one they give them.

In fantasy, authors can make whatever choices please them - I have little issue with Tolkien having hobbits grow tobacco in a northern European climate or think nothing of having Camellias in their gardens and drinking tea. But those choices are made by people in their own contexts and from their own prejudices and philosophies. In that sense, you could argue that Tolkien is replicating, with little by way of critique, the exact colonial ignorances we carry in our everyday lives. While the familiarity of Hobbiton might be comforting, perhaps seeing other sorts of familiarity that we like less can give us a new lens on what it really means to be a hobbit.

Books Cited/Referenced

Tolkien, J.R.R., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Revised and Expanded Edition)

Tolkien, The Hobbit

Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Judd and Judd, Flora of Middle-earth

Kincaid, Jamaica, My Garden (Book)