Chapter Five: Sam’s Garden

In the Undying Lands

Frodo smiled as Sam’s mouth gaped wide in wonder. There before him, unless his eyes cheated him, was Bag End and its garden, but here in the West! With one hand, he grasped the hand of his master that he already held a bit tighter, and with the other rubbed his eyes to make sure they weren’t playing him false. Frodo giggled a bit.

“It’s true, my Sam! A smial in the Undying Lands of the West! And what is more wondrous is that it was already waiting here for us when Bilbo and I arrived. I set to making the garden just days after we arrived because I wanted you to be feel at home and happy here. It helped me greatly to get through the initial loss and beginning the new life I was determined to forge so you would find me well.”

“Thank you, me dear. ’Tis a marvel and no mistake,” Sam breathed in awe as he continued to look around in wonder.

He opened the gate and ran his fingers over the wood and latch. It felt wonderfully solid and very hobbit-like, though different also, for it was Elven as well.

“It won’t disappear under your hand,” Frodo assured. “I was afraid of the same thing myself. The first morning I slept here, I felt as though I was in my own bed and I wondered for a moment why you hadn’t yet come to draw back the curtains. I expected you to come knocking at any moment, but when you didn’t, I realized slowly why. I wandered long that first day, mostly indoors, because I couldn’t bear to go out. This felt like home, outside didn’t. Everything was precisely set, just like it always had been, even our walking sticks by the door. It felt quite queer at first. Bilbo wandered, just as I did, and he held me when I wept and I held him when he did. But it was wonderfully healing after a while, to have breakfast in our own kitchen; supper under the stars which we learned to love, even though they were quite different; tea and a pipe in the parlour; reading and writing in the study. Just you wait and see!”

Sam touched the knob on the round door and pushed on it slightly and there he stepped back into time, where he was back home. A sigh escaped his lips and Frodo smiled wider.

“I almost think I’m going see my Rose come around the corner any moment,” Sam said.

“Just as I thought too many times to count that I thought I would see you, or hear you. I think at times I did.”

Sam walked slowly around, then he went out to see the garden, and it was almost as wonderful as the one he had left, and in some ways, even more wonderful. Even more slowly did he walk there and felt the rich soil under his feet. He had walked in Bag End’s garden since he could toddle around and knew every inch of it more intimately than he knew anything except for the heart of the treasure he had left buried in that garden and the heart of the one whose hand he still held. He sat down at the white bench, near twin to the one which had sat in the Hobbiton garden for so long and still did, and dug his toes into the soil. He almost thought it responded to his touch. How many afternoons had Sam worked in the garden where the first bench was while Frodo had sat there, working on his lessons or reading to his friend and brother. How many evenings Sam had sat there himself, after his master had left, looking up at the stars and feeling closer to Frodo because of where he sat and what he looked at. Elvish stars as he thought them on the Quest and he wondered which ones he would see in the sky this night.

“You feel it, don’t you?” Frodo asked. “It’s excited to have a real gardener around!”

Sam tore his gaze away from the garden a moment to look into his beloved’s shining eyes. “You are just as much a one as me, master dear, if you did all this, and don’t you be thinking otherwise!” He looked back in wonder at the garden. “It’s grander than Bag End ever was.”

Frodo giggled. “Oh, Sam, Sam, I did what I could and it tolerated my efforts. But this is not all my doing. The soil, the very air, is blessed, and it is no wonder that things grew as well as they did. I tried to remember all I had learned from you and I told the flowers all about you and what a wonderful gardener you were and how I could not wait for you to come. I could swear they were listening! And now you have and they know it. I can’t wait to see what marvels you are going to accomplish!”

“I wondered what flowers I would see here, all the Elven ones I thought, but I didn’t think I’d see morning glories again, or...” here Sam stroked one petal ever so gently, as though afraid his touch would ruin such a delicate masterpiece, “...or a rose...”

“It’s from those seeds I pilfered from your collection right before we left. I take it you found my note begging forgiveness?”

Sam nodded. “You said, you wanted to stay at home and you wanted me to be at home, so you were taking them, hoping they would grow.” He wiped at his teary eyes. “Well, grow they did, and that’s a fact.”

He looked at Frodo’s shining face, drew him down to the bench and held him tight.

The days happily passed as they had in the Shire, with Sam in the garden and Frodo on the bench, sometimes just happily watching his beloved gardener and guardian, sometimes reading aloud to him as slowly Sam learned Quenya. The younger hobbit loved to hear his master speak it, though they mostly spoke Westron among themselves, except when Frodo sang his Sam to sleep as was necessary at times in the beginning when grief over Rose’s death was still fresh.

Just as Frodo had said, the garden flourished anew under Sam’s expert, loving touch. The soil that his hands and feet had always been in felt alive and responsive to him in a way that the gardener marveled at. “It’s just like you said, me dear, when you touched the tree in Lorien, and felt its joy,” Sam said one day and Frodo smiled understandingly. They watched as each new bloom came eagerly up, almost as though in competition to show off how much they gloried in being tended by a master of the craft.

“Do you feel at home, my Sam?” the elder hobbit murmured as they slept out one night in the midst of the garden and listened, smelled and watched the vibrant life around and above them.

“Yes, me Frodo dear, now and for always.”