The Gardens of Gorgoroth

"Going to Mordor!" Cried Pippin. "I hope it won’t come to that!"
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Welcome to the Gardens of Gorgoroth,
a Shire colony in Mordor!

The Gardens are open to all and we welcome volunteer gardeners of all kinds, even Goblins. The Gardens are organized by the Shire Defence Squad, a band of valiant and ferocuous Hobbits, highly skilled in all forms of arms due to a long and relentless training under their captain @Periantar. With high hopes and brave hearts, these intrepid Hobbit warriors have headed South to make of Mordor a Garden in the Sun.

OK it aint looking so nice yet. That is why we need you to lend a hand, Hobbits and Others.

Rules. Anyone is welcome to plant a tree, grow some broccoli, raise some flowers, lay a lawn, or even make a rock garden. Whatever takes your fancy, please just step in and do it. Together we will make Mordor a green and pleasant land, overseen by the new overlords of Mordor, the Shire Defence Squad.
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Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Periantar wanders about the vale of Gorgoroth, kicking small stones here, and shuffling ash piles there. Hmm, surely to transform, even just a small section of this Eru forsaken corner of Middle Earth would be quite a mountainous task, if only because of the mountainous piles of rock dug up from the slag pits

Speaking Outlook, Peri confidently tapped the spine of a particularly immense tome in his satchel, "And you,my beloved book, will be the one to help me make this long awaited difference."

Peri wandered off zigging and zagging across the plain, with a spring in his step, and muttering expectantly to himself.
Periantar:
I am a multi facited hobbit, for I am a gardener;
a leader, hobbit second regiment of the HDS;
and fireworks meister of TISAPA.

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Tylwyth Took looked around at the SDS's new venture, unsure whether to go with an air of newbie excitement, or a more jaded world weariness.

The excitement won, as it always did at the beginning of a new project, before she got distracted by something else interesting.

"So, what's the plan? Are we trying to bring a cosy Shire garden vibe to this barren place, or are we going for more of a dark gothic garden aesthetic as a nod towards Mordor, with maybe some nice all seeing eye garden sculptures and so on?"

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Chrysophylax Dives

Hi @Periantar and Tylwyth. I don't usually do menial work like this but Fairbairn had heard this rumour that Sam and Frodo might have got to Mordor quicker by eagle, and so we were inspired to air-drop some material by dragon. First - always first - is a map.

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So, as you see, we have quite a big area earmarked for garden development and can experiment with lots of different gardening techniques.

Second, I stopped off in Rohan and picked up a large, steaming pile of horse manure.
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Just help yourself, there is plenty more in Rohan. And if we run out there have been a few Tolkien conferences recently with some proper academic papers, so the supply of fresh manure is almost unlimited.

Here are some seeds.
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Finally, for those who want to recreate the true, home away from home, hippie experience, here are instructions on how to make a tipi.

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Fairbairn will be along soon. He got stuck in a passage in Moria but with Orcs pushing and Dwarves pulling they managed to squeeze him through eventually. I think he is now somewhere in the Dead Marshes. But he says that you should just start planting whatever pops into your heads.

Do watch out for stray Goblins, wraiths, trolls, and remember that not all Dwarves are friendly!

@VelvetineZone
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Fairbairn the Fat

That is totally made up about me getting stuck in Moria! You know @Chrysophylax Dives I could make an official complaint about body-shaming! I'll let it pass this time because you might be useful flying in more materials. But I find it a bit rich being called overweight by a dragon with a belly the size of the Albert Hall!

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The reason that I was delayed is because I stopped off in Lothlórien to gather some of that magic dust that Galadriel gave to Sam, and also some Mallorn seeds. With a sprinkle of this dust anything will grow, even in Mordor.

So, I think we are all set to begin gardening. Anyone have any suggestions for how we should begin?
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Magic dust, seeds and tipis? This was all reminding Tylwyth of her very Bohemian upbringing.

But where to start? A nice garden in the shade of Mount Doom? Or a bit of permaculture experimentation by the Sea of Nurnen?

Tylwyth decided to research the area a bit more

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Gardening in Mordor is a great album name.

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Tylwyth was feeling very tired and decided that before the Shire Defence Squad got stuck into gardening, they needed a good sleep. So she started to construct a simple shelter from earth and sticks and the ancient tarpaulin she'd found in her house back in the Shire. Once it was ready she crawled into a sleeping bag, surrounded by the boxes of seeds and saplings and plants she'd ordered from the legendary Whole Middle-earth Gardening Catalogue before setting off. Before she knew it, she had crawled out of the shelter, and made a start, planting a foxglove beside a moss covered tree trunk in the dark.

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Periantar, espying an immense pile of steaming horse poo in the distance, hurried over excitedly to inspect the manure deposit.

"Mmm, looks fresh." With a deep breath, Peri takes in the aroma and begun speaking loudly to... no one in particular, or maybe to that curvy hobbit over by the foxgloves, "Smells fresh! just what we need in this ashen land; all of the ground will be so alkaline - the good Mr and Mrs Sodfoots-feet say so in their fine volume on the subtle art of gardening." Peri was again storking his gardening book, this time as he clutched it to his chest. "They say the best thing for alkaline soil it a good dose of fresh Rohirrim manure!"

At this, Peri produced a shovel and a mattock from... somewhere... and commenced to digging. Well re-arranging and digging really. He begun work just to the east of Mount Doom, where the land began to flatten out. All the ground about him had been seared by the eruptions of Mount Doom. It was covered in the volcanic ash of Mount Doom andwas pocked with cisterns that had been dug, and for every great hole in the ground, there was an equally huge mound rubble. Peri began the back breaking work of levelling an area large enough for a potato patch that any good hobbit would be pleased to call his own. According to the gardening gurus, Sodfoots-feet, the process would be to break down the rubble bit by bit in order to back fill the great holes in the ground, and from there to dig through it, as much of the fresh manure as possible. Time would then be necessary for the two to combine and create a rich and healthy soil - something the Plateau of Gorgoroth has not known for Ages out of mind.

The work was hard, but the potatoes would be all the more glorious for it!

"Nasturtiums! Nasturtiums too lend a little colour to some of these dratted cisterns! Now there's an idea!"
Periantar:
I am a multi facited hobbit, for I am a gardener;
a leader, hobbit second regiment of the HDS;
and fireworks meister of TISAPA.

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Fairbairn the Fat

Fairbairn rested on his shovel, surveyed the vast slag heaps of dust and ashes stretching out before him, and sighed. He had learned much about gardening in a very short space of time. What he had most taken to heart was the lesson that gardening is a very good thing for other people to do. The harder he worked the more he appreciated this.

Time for another bit of work. Fairbairn picked up the shovel and walked over to where the seeds were stored. Feeling quite tired from the stroll, he rested once again on his shovel and settled in for a longer than usual break. Surveying the bleak vista, he sighed again. What he really wanted was a cup of tea.
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Fairbairn the Fat

Fairbairn picked up a seed, hoisted his shovel, and walked to the magic dust. After another lengthy breather, he picked up a sprinkle of magic dust and walked with shovel and seed and sprinkle to the hole that he had dug earlier. Feeling almost excited he decided to skip the regulation rest after this latest exertion and, after only a few huffs and puffs, dropped the seed in the hole, sprinkled the dust, and then shoveled in some horse manure, covering up the hole.

Now Fairbairn was ready for a well deserved rest! He planted his shovel, leaned his weight on it, and returned to looking out on the miserable view and wishing he was back home in his nice Hobbit house. Just as he was recalling the sound of the kettle whistling in his downstairs the ground under his feet seemed to shake and an ominous rumble burst into a terrible roar.

KABOOM!

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(image credit: IrenHorrors; note that Fairbairn's stomach is not drawn according to scale and the boots are pure invention.)

Fairbairn kept going up and up, as the seedling grew and grew. Pretty soon, he thought, I'm going to hit the Golden Gate. But that was just some random bit of song stuck in his head. What actually happened was that his head smashed through the crystal ceiling of Mordor and, to his astonishment, Fairbairn crawled off the leaf he had been hanging onto for dear life, through a large pile of parcels, to find himself in the Lore Post Office. Chrysophylax Dives, the Lore Postmistress, did not look pleased.
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Tylwyth had been mostly in the research stage of gardening since planting her foxglove, which is to say she'd been hanging out in her shelter surrounded by gardening books, leafing through the nice pictures, and sketching ideas.

She was very impressed therefore to emerge and see how much work Periantar and Fairbairn had done spreading and shovelling.

However, Fairbairn seemed to have disappeared, leaving only some kind of giant gothic beanstalk in his wake.

A Gothic Garden! That was perfect for the gloomy volcanic lands of Mordor. In fact, maybe she'd already thought of this. Her short term memory was too ropey to remember, and she couldn't be bothered to scroll back through the thread either.

She spent a pleasant day wandering around the bleak landscape gathering twisted rotting tree trunks and weird clumps of volcanic lava, and brought them back to place decoratively around the beanstalk, foxglove and muck. There, now that looked beautifully weird and sinister.

There was clearly something missing though. She really needed the right outfit to match the dark creepy garden. But where did you go shopping for goth clothes in Mordor?

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Tylwyth could not sleep in the strange land. She wandered out to explore the bleakness of Mordor, aided by looking it up online, and picking up her ancient copy of LOTR and turning to the end sections which she had not read for many years.

Consequently she found herself wandering amidst dark pools and withered mosses and smoke and shadows, whilst the sinister slopes of Mount Doom appeared and disappeared in the gloom, and lights shone from the Dead Marshes.

This really is quite unnerving, she thought, as she explored the grim and yet lyrically described landscape. She gathered some withered mosses and made her way back.

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(Breaking character).

Thanks for thinking of gardening in Mordor @Chrysophylax Dives!

It inspired me to pick up my very old copy of LOTR and skim that section. Which then inspired me to write down ideas for descriptive writing extracts for English Language sessions with my son.

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OOC: Congratulations @VelvetineZone, you have now picked up a copy of LOTR more recently than almost any other member of The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza. (OOC = Out of Character)

Fairbarin the Fat
Fairbairn was back in Mordor after the dragon had made him climb back down the beanstalk. Fairbairn had never appreciated how stuck up and full of himself that dragon was. Usually when he was hanging out with the Adamanta Chubb Librarian in the Shire he was polite and friendly. But just put a Post Mistress hat on his head and he acts like the Lord of the Post Offices! Anyway, for the moment the beanstalk was still standing and Fairbairn was at the bottom of it.

He walked over to Tylwyth, who was holding some withered moss in her hand and looking a bit overwhelemd by the sheer misery of the landscape of Mordor.

"Twylth, I reckon we need a project to breath life into this horrible place. I am going to make an ornamental rock garden just here. The design of the rock garden came to me in a vision as I was sitting on the growing beanstalk and solidified into a definite plan as I descended. This rock garden in Mordor will reveal by mystical geometrical juxtapositions the TRUE shape of the upstairs of my house in Hobbiton!"
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Tylwyth agreed that a rock garden was a great idea and that she liked mystical geometry, noting also that Fairbairn was back to thinking about stairs again. She wandered around with her withered moss, which was now an emotional support object and needed naming, and also thinking about sacred geometry and spiral staircases and rock gardens, before remembering that 1. She was also busy inventing imaginary tarot sets and 2. She had better make breakfast in real life (OOC). And 3. She was off to look at Middle Earth words and names and pick one for her pet withered moss, which reminded her a bit of the Fizzgigs in The Dark Crystal.
Last edited by VelvetineZone on Mon Sep 02, 2024 10:57 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Tylwyth decided she would name her pet withered moss Maglor after a poet from the Silmarillion she'd discovered in a swift online search, having never read it. Maglor. It was a good name. Now at last she had a companion to replace the sadly destroyed sentient badger. Maglor the Moss.

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Remembering J.R.R. Tolkien who died on this day in 1973.

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Fairbairn the Fat

Fairbairn stood back and surveyed the rock garden he had made. In his head, it had looked magnificent. But he had not taken into account that in Mordor the rocks need to be distguinshed from the ground because the ground is all rocks. Also, the lava flow had run right through the middle of the rock garden and destroyed the wonderful pattern at the center.
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Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Fairbairn the Fat

Fairbairn was staring down into the pit. The captive goblins of Mordor, old admins most of them, were chained to the bicycle frames that had been set in concrete. And with two slayer-badgers walking among them with whips, they were peddling as fast as they could. Fairbairn smiled grimly. The goblin slaves were generating the power that the cables carefully attached to the beanstalk would carry all the way up to the Lore Post Office. Soon it would be time to turn on the switch in Lore - and the plaza would fall!

Fairbairn's grim smile gave way to an insane cackle. All these months hiding the plans from everyone, working in the dark, pretending that the badgers were haunting him. Soon the masks would be off and the badgers unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Fairbairn the Fat

The Pit was getting crowded. The clan of badger-scouts told off to rout out the mutant-hamsters hiding in the holes and under the rocks of Mordor had returned with a horde of the pouching menaces, each one individually bound by its claws and dropped into an old sack. Having shaken the bags out into the Pit, the Hobbits of the SDS had a long-term plan of setting up hamster wheels, in which the hamsters would run and so generate power as the goblin slaves were doing with the bicycles. But the wheels had to be made in Minas Tirith and would not arrive for some weeks, so Fairbairn had set up the new prisoners with garden peas.

Each hamster was chained but able to reach four peas on the ground. Now they were all locked in an endless pouching cycle. One pea was picked up with two claws and placed in the mouth, then a second - now both hamster cheeks were filled, with room for a third in the middle. Then the hamsters picked up a fourth and tried to pop it in, but there was no room and one of the other peas fell out. And repeat. The ground had been carefully fixed with wires and weights and what have you so that when the fourth pea fell it generated new power that was zapped up the cable running around the beanstalk all the way to the Lore Post Office way above the Mordor crystal ceiling.

But the four-pea method was inefficient. The power generated was miniscule. Moreover, Fairbairn shared the badgers' innate loathing of hamsters, who were so cute they were sometimes mistaken for Hobbits. Fairbairn sighed and looked almost with fondness at the Goblin slaves. Even the old admins among them did not pouch. Maybe it would make more sense simply to eat the hamsters and then turn their skins into luxury fur hats that the Hobbits could sell as ermine to those backward horse folk in Rohan?
Last edited by Chrysophylax Dives on Thu Nov 28, 2024 6:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Tylwyth was bored of being a hobbit and following the rules of existence and so on, so she had discovered a magic form changing portal which enabled her to became a Maia, and reappear as a Lady-Wizard, or Wizardess, and taken the name Tylwyth the Turquoise, and got some snazzy turquoise robes and lots of lovely silver and turquoise jewellery, probably mined by Dwarves with turquoise mines.

Now she had returned to Mordor to try and free the enslaved badgers and hamsters, using the old what this old thing, its just a staff that I lean on trick, to sneak in her twisty driftwood magic staff which was decorated with turquoise and shells, and quivering with deep magic waiting to be released.

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Fairbairn the Fat

"Hello Tylwyth the Mai with the staff quivering with deep turquoise magic waiting to be released", said Fairbairn the Fat to Tylwyth the Mai with the staff quivering with deep turquoise magic waiting to be released. "Just so you are clear on the situation, the hamsters are enslaved because the badgers have enslaved them. You can rescue the hamsters from the badgers; or you could join the badgers enslaving the hamsters. Beware of the first option, O Mai with the shell-decorated driftwood staff. Possibly your turquoise magic will overcome some of these badgers, even many of them, when it is released. But within our Gardens are very many battle-hardened badger clans, and if you fail to slay just one single badger, O Tylwyth the Mai, that will be the end of thy turquoise magic."
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Tylwyth was still convinced that the badgers were innately good, and actually secretly wasn't really bothered about hamsters but didn't want to abandon them to their fate.
She consulted her son, who was sitting next to her, and he thought the entire situation could be resolved by introducing cats and ducks. She wasn't quite sure about this.
It had been a long day so she decided to go and hang out in the Prancing Pony, get a nice cold drink, and catch up with some Rangers.

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Fairbairn the Fat

Surveying the bloody mess of fur and feathers left by the Slayer Badgers of the River-clan, Fairbairn threw up. He found violence distasteful and had not enjoyed watching the ritual disembowling of the ducks that for some reason the River-clan deemed a sacred ritual when slaughtering water fowl. On the other hand, if all those feathers were collected it might be possible to make a quilt, which would be very welcome in the cold nights of Mordor. And the cat fur could certainly produce some fur hats for the Rohan market.

Fairbairn wondered what the son of the Mai with the quivering driftwood staff would suggest next? If they came back, he wondered if the gift of a few dozen hamsters might appease their evident displeasure? They could keep them as pets, eat them, or use them to generate electricity as the mood took them. Whose heart would not melt at such a generous gift?
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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Thank goodness, thought Tylwyth, on hearing the news, that they had not sent in real cats and ducks, instead having got a bunch of old dead orcs and sent them through a portal that brought them back to life in the form of cats and ducks.
Thank goodness, she also thought, that the Rangers had turned up at the Prancing Pony with some lovely talkative sentient badgers who had nothing to with the ones Fairbairn was inciting into pointless savagery.
And thank goodness for the long cold beer.

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Fairbairn the Fat

Fairbairn was conducting chemical tests on the remains of the cats and ducks. A rumour had it that they were really dead Orcs. But Fairbairn had a small bucket of Orc innards for comparison and that rumour was dead wrong - no Orc had intestines, liver, heart, or kidneys like these. Even comparing globules of splattered brain was instructive, for duck brains are special, singular, and unique, and Fairbairn knew a globule of duck brain when he tasted one.

He was glad to have squashed that rumour. What really bugged him about it was the suggestion that the badger-made carnage was pointless savagery. This was Mordor, the land of murderous hate, so cruel and violent death was not pointless but the very reason for existence.

Possibly the son of the Maia could make a good thing of it in Mordor. But the Maia herself, Fairbairn suspected, was a Hobbit changeling, raised with Maia powers but with the sentimental, sweet, and kind heart of a gentle Hobbit. And the more he considered the various antics of Tylwyth the more suspicious he became.

"Hmmmm! Smells like Elves!" Fairbairn thought to himself, and cast his eye down over the goblin slaves peddling the bicycles in the Pit. "In fact, smells like admin blood!"

Maybe the son of Tylwyth would do a deal to sell his mother and she could join the others of her kind in the Pit? Hmmm. What if the son of the Maia was appointed as the general who commanded the army of Slayer Badgers in the upcoming conquest of Rivendell? A bit like that Orc with the funny face who announces the day of the Orc has arrived in the movies? Surely that would appeal to him. Enough to sell his mother into the Pit? There was only one way to find out. Fairbairn headed off to the Mordor post office.
Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water.

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The son of the Maia refuses your kind but bloodthirsty offer.

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