Tolkien's Floral Fixation

[Guinevere]

Great topic, Faramir! For me, the references and descriptions of flowers, herbs, trees and other plants add greatly to my enjoyment of Tolkien's books and to the feeling of Middle Earth being real. This is of course because I myself am fond of flowers and plants and like to be able to name them. Since English isn't my mothertongue, I had to look up many many names, and learnt a lot that way!

Another symbolic use of a white flower is Aragorn's comparison of Eowyn to
"a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die?"