The Wisdom of the Shire

There’s a deep interest amongst the Halflings concerning horticulture, and not just the propagation of Old Toby’s Leaf. Therefore, as one might expect, one of the most respected jobs in the Shire is that of the gardener.*

Bilbo’s chief gardener is the old Gaffer Gamgee* whom Bilbo refers to with the honorific “Master,” and with whom he is constantly consulting upon the important questions of growing vegetables—especially potatoes. Hobbits love boiled tubers like dragons crave roasted Dwarf.

Bilbo would have got much of the food he ate from his own land, and the Gaffer would have done all of this important work along with his son and apprentice Sam at his side. Bilbo leaves the Shire after his one hundred and eleventh birthday to go live in Rivendell. But before he departs, he bestows several gifts upon the Gaffer: two sacks of potatoes, a new spade and some ointment for rheumatism—no doubt caused by decades of digging Bilbo’s soil!

After Frodo sells Bag End and departs the Shire with the Ring, Sam comes along with him under the pretense he’ll be tending his master’s new garden at Crickhollow Cottage in Buckland. When they get to Lothlórien, however, the clairvoyant Elven queen Galadriel doesn’t need to be told Sam is a gardener. She immediately recognizes Sam’s gift as a grower.*

The Shire and its folk, as I pointed out earlier, are idealized versions of early Medieval England and its farmers. During that time period most people lived in little houses made of a mixture of soil, sand, clay and dung spread over a lattice of woven branches.* These earthy homes, like aboveground Hobbit-holes, were surrounded on all sides by a small garden space—a cottage garden. This is where the farmers could grow food exclusively for themselves, as opposed to the crops they grew in common fields with their neighbors.

Tolkien referred to Sam—his favorite character—as “the jewel” of Hobbits. It might be argued he is the real hero of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s works are filled with other doughty agriculturalists, like the eponymous hero of his story Farmer Giles of Ham, a good-natured plump farmer (just like Sam Gamgee) who is drawn into a great adventure. In The Lord of the Rings two other agronomists—Farmer Cotton and Farmer Maggot—both make brief but important appearances.

In The Fellowship of the Ring the Gaffer actually has a conversation with one of the Black Riders, and the plucky old Hobbit faces up to the terrifying creature without running and cowering inside his hole like any sane Big Person would have done. The Gaffer would probably have been more afraid of potato blight than the undead Nazgûl’s Black Breath.

Let’s take an imaginary tour of what a Hobbit-hole garden might have looked like in its prime. By the Shire reckoning it’s the month of Wedmath (mid-August).* Imagine you’re standing in front of a little handmade wooden gate that opens into a patch of sunny yard that’s surrounded by a low fence made of woven branches. You open the gate and walk under an arbor thick with hanging clusters of grapes—you can reach up and pluck some as you pass. The grapes are the fattest and juiciest you’ve ever seen, for this is “The Great Year of Plenty”—the summer after the downfall of Sauron.

You enter the garden and are bathed in sunlight. Every inch of the little yard is filled with raised beds and pots bursting with growing things: mounds of earth topped with thick potato leaves and dotted with white blooms, tripods constructed from apple suckers supporting bean and pea tendrils snaking toward the sky, the tops of purple-red beets poking from the soil and tall sunflowers with their faces turned toward the path of the sun.

At the far end of the northern side of the garden is a brick wall. Fruit trees have been trained to grow against the wall to catch the heat radiating from the bricks. These trees have taken the gardener years to prune and train into their intricate shapes. Their production of fruit is extended significantly because the trees are able to absorb the maximum amount of solar energy.

Everywhere is the loud drone of honeybees at their work. Bees are an integral part of a cottage garden. These insects provide the gardener with honey (Tolkien was quite fond of honey in his tea), as well as playing one of the most important roles in agriculture—they pollinate all of the plants. The gardener keeps his bees in several big overturned woven straw baskets.* And everywhere—in pots, along the edges of vegetable beds, even stuffed into the cracks of the brick wall—flowers and herbs are in full bloom. These supply the bees with pollen and nectar when the vegetables aren’t in blossom.

The gardener spends most of his day here, hoeing the weeds and watering. In the afternoon he lets his chickens out of their coops and they wander about eating harmful insects from off the vegetables and providing a constant source of fertilizer. A curious crow alights on the fence and nods his head, cawing in a friendly way, while a robin redbreast and his mate dig in the soil for grubs, always keeping one eye on the lazy cat curled up in a patch of sun, swishing her tail contentedly.

Later in the day the gardener sits with his back against the warm brick wall, eating a slice of the missus’s warm bread, enjoying a pint and puffing on some pipe-weed. He smiles as he blows the bluish vapor toward the sky, thinking of Gandalf’s famous multicolored smoke ring tricks.

The first time I helped make a garden I was in my twenties. My wife and I were newly married and renting a tiny old house directly behind a parking lot. In our backyard was a derelict patch of grass about the size of a small bedroom. We got permission from our landlord (a diminutive Hobbity sort of woman we called “Mrs. Sniff” because of her habit of sniffing all the time) to turn this unused space into a garden.

Everything we planted in that little place grew like it had been dusted with Galadriel’s magic soil. We had enormous Brandywine tomatoes (planted in honor of the Brandywine River, of course) and cucumbers fat and sweet. There were delicious lettuces and enough basil to make dozens of pesto dinners. It had all been so easy. We simply stripped off the sod, turned the soil, mixed in some compost we got from the local feed and seed, planted some seeds and watered. We had no idea what we were doing. But we were on our way to creating our first cottage garden—like a little piece of the Shire.*

During World War II Britons, Canadians and Americans were encouraged to grow victory gardens to supplement their meals because of the intense rationing. President Roosevelt put one in on the White House grounds. People dug up their yards and planted vegetables. In the United States during those war years, nearly 50 percent of the country’s produce was grown in these small gardens.*

Tolkien spent a lot of time in his garden during WWII, and kept chickens, scrounging difficult-to-find wood and recycled nails to build his coops. There’s an urban chicken movement going on right now. Thousands of people are keeping chickens (and sometimes ducks) in cities, while other city and suburban dwellers are discovering how to raise bees for the production of honey and beeswax.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early ’90s Cuba lost its steady supply of diesel fuel to run its big farms. The population of Havana—where two-thirds of Cubans live—faced with drastic food shortages, had to turn quickly to the idea of urban farming. Three hundred thousand patios, backyards and lots were rapidly turned into gardens. A little over twenty years later, Cuba is using half the diesel fuel to feed the same number of people, and they’re doing it without pesticides or petroleum-based fertilizers. Oxen were reintroduced to do field work, providing free manure.

The Hobbits, we must remember, would have done all of their labor by hand or with the aid of hoofed animals. The most complex machines at their disposal, Tolkien tells us at the beginning of The Hobbit, were water mills and forge bellows.

Try digging yourself a small garden bed and see how satisfying it feels to look at the newly turned earth just waiting to be planted. You’ll know why Sam keeps dreaming of his garden while in the barren wastelands of Mordor. (Instructions on how to make your own Hobbit garden can be found at the end of this book.)

After the Shire is liberated from Saruman, Sam sets out to make repairs. To him that means getting things growing. “Where there’s life there’s hope,” as the Gaffer always used to tell him. Sam, clever Hobbit that he is, uses Galadriel’s gift of magic soil one grain at a time, spreading the potent dust all over the Shire.

He plants the mallorn tree seed by the stump of the Party Tree and patiently waits for spring. The sapling that springs up from the ground is so healthy and fast growing it nearly leaps from the dirt—a sturdy silver-barked wand. There will be another Party Tree. A place to celebrate life. For the Shire-folk—who are so totally connected to the land where they live—nothing could be as momentous as this resurrection of the natural world.

Happily, we don’t need magical dust to make things grow. But maybe it’s a good idea to go back in time and rediscover the old ways of life that worked. Let’s hold onto the good things that keep us healthy like modern dental care and vaccines for the pox, but chuck aside harmful pesticides that are killing the world’s bees and genetically modified mutant foods. Progress needs to be redefined using some of the common sense of the gentle farmers of the Shire.

The appendices to The Lord of the Rings reveal that after Sam and Rosie Cotton got married they changed their surname. They became “the Gardners,” thus starting a long and famous line of Hobbit lads and lassies who worked the ground, making it spring to life in a friendship with the earth.

The Wisdom of the Shire Tells Us …

“To grow your dinner from a seed planted and tended by your own hand is more wondrous than a wizard’s sorcery.”