The Constant Gardener by Tehta

Fanwork Notes

0. Parts of this story were obviously inspired by the legend of Johnny Appleseed, who travelled across a freshly-colonized land planting apple orchards. (Which yielded rather poor quality apples that were generally used to make alcohol—yes, I stole that part, too.)
1. The name Orneredh is a straightforward homage to Johnny, since it (hopefully) means tree-seed, as in Orn-eredh. I could not find a decent-sounding word for apple, but it’s all for the best: Egalmoth prefers kirsch to cider, anyway.
2. The Ivonwim, Yavanna’s handmaidens, were in charge of growing the special corn used in making lembas.
3. Do you know how many Gondolindrim made it out of the Valley? About 800. (Remember, this was a city that had sent an army of 10,000 out to help Fingon.)
4. Egalmoth’s remarks about the difficulty of approaching Gondolin were inspired by the following statement: “[The Gondolindrim] had long ago with unimagined toil levelled and cleared and delved all that plain about Amon Gwareth, so that scarce [Elf] or bird or beast or snake could approach but was espied from many leagues off”, from “The Fall of Gondolin” in the Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Which everyone should read, as it is awesome.
5. The “plants springing up on a grave” trope is particularly common in Tolkien’s works. In the First Age (and in this story, of course) we have Haudh-en-Ndengin, the Hill of the Slain (“But grass came there and grew again long and green upon that hill, alone in all the desert that Morgoth had made.”) and Glorfindel’s grave (“Then Thorondor bore up Glorfindel’s body out of the abyss, and they buried him in a mound of stones beside the pass; and a green turf came there, and yellow flowers bloomed upon it amid the barrenness of stone, until the world was changed.”) There are a lot more flowery burial mounds in LotR, as well, but I do hope those weren’t all Orneredh’s work. She needs a vacation.
6. Great thanks are offered to eveiya and suzelle, fearless betas.
7. I have not said this in a while, but... constructive criticism is always very welcome.

Fanwork Information

Summary: Running Yavanna’s errands in First Age Middle-earth is a tough job, but someone has to do it.  (Written for the B2MeM prompt, “Write or create art in which a character plants something.” Not a light-hearted humour fic. At all. A little quirky, though.) Major Characters: Major Relationships: Genre: Challenges: B2MeM 2014 Rating: Teens Warnings: Character Death
Chapters: 1	Word Count: 3, 898
Posted on 28 March 2014	Updated on 28 March 2014
This fanwork is complete.