Written for Tanaqui's birthday.

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The faint scent of flowering trees drifted over the ruined walls. "Almond or apple," Faramir thought drowzily; trees of the lineage of the rose, with their sweet, five-petaled flowers.

Long ago, Ithilien was laid out in fields and orchards and well-tended woods, a chessboard with squares of brown and bright green. Apricots, apples and pears were sent to the markets of northern Gondor and south to Belfalas. He tried to imagine all those fruit trees in flower, acre after acre of shining, white branches.

"How beautiful it must have been," he thought as he drifted to sleep in the farmhouse.