Sam always remembers fourteen hundred and eight, partly because of Gandalf going away, and partly because it was the September that he forgot the irises. Irises are Frodo's favorite flowers, what with them growing so freely out in the marshes and down by the river, and Frodo being a Bucklander by birth (and there's more than a few talk about the Bucklanders who oughtn't to talk at all with what goes on behind their front doors, not that it's any of Sam's business, mind you) and every year, he sees that a pot or two are ready for cutting on Frodo and Mr. Bilbo's birthday. Along the banks of the little streams that run off the Brandywine, Frodo says, they open in Spring, sun-gold blooms like the heads of miniature dragons with tiny gaping jaws belching color amongst the reeds.

Sam isn't altogether sure whether he likes thinking of flowers as dragons, because while stories about elves are pretty in any season, them seeming to be the sort of folk who, after their books were all put away, might enjoy a bit of garden much as he does, dragons belong to cold winter evenings where the only fire burning is in the hearth and Sam feels very glad of the weight of the door and even gladder that most of the flowers are tucked safely away asleep beneath the frozen soil. So he sticks to what he does know about Frodo's irises, and he knows that for blooming in September, he has to pot in the last days of July and keep the bulbs somewhere cool and dim and quiet, usually in the far corner of the pantry, until the first green points peep from their crumbly paper casing. But fourteen hundred and eight was the summer that Bag End's rhubarb grew twice as high as was needed, and also the summer that Merry Brandybuck came visiting for a fortnight from Brandy Hall - where, they say, they know how to ferment air and sunlight - and the pantry was very soon filled up with so many bottles of rhubarb wine that the irises took up residence in the potting shed. When Sam found them behind a wheelbarrow in October, they were all grown tall and pale in the dark like old onions.

He plants mint and sage near the kitchen door at Bag End (a place for everything, and everything in its place, as his Gaffer says) and hollyhocks tall at the gate, and chamomile and thyme running over onto the steps so they might give up their scent if a foot happens to catch them in passing. Underneath the parlour window, he sets purple loosestrife and white traveler's joy, and around that of the study, he trains the honeysuckle, letting it stumble shyly over the sill to greet Frodo when he pushes the casement wide and just sits as he does, chewing at the thumbnail of the one hand and pillowing his cheek ever so lightly with the other as his eyes follow a path a hundred miles long, over the dim blue hills and somewhere that Sam can't follow. Frodo's eyes are the very same blue as the hills just as they touch the sky and are swallowed up in cloud.

It might seem to those not familiar with Frodo's habits that he seldom notices the flowers, wandering, as he does when he is not out tramping over the fields, from book to window-seat and finally to paper and inkpot, but their ways aren't Frodo's ways, plain and simple; Frodo lets Sam take care of what he's good at taking care of, just as it ought to be, and Sam wouldn't trade having Frodo wander up beside him with his eyes deep and warm while he's cutting a few marigolds, mayhaps, and say, "Those are beautiful, Sam," in his clear low voice, for anything in the Shire. And likely a good bit of what's beyond it, as well.

There are those that called Mr. Bilbo 'Mad Baggins', and call Frodo after him, being shut up with books so much come rain or shine. Not that Sam could give a pig's ear about what the likes of Ted Sandyman and Cowman Brockbanks might say down at the Green Dragon, but he got around to thinking a long while back that fairy blood or no, Frodo sort of drifts through the days, inhabiting them like woodsmoke in a chimney and never really quite touching, and sometimes Sam wants to reach out with his hand just to comfort himself that Frodo is there, and not gone away somewhere into his stories, leaving a dusty picture of himself behind, like when he was a lad and Halfred helped his Gaffer cut down the old sycamore at the end of Bagshot Row and found out it had been mostly hollow for a long time.

Sam thinks that it must be in his blood to be a gardener; that he must have been born to dig and sow, to nurture, to gently help the most fragile bud to blossom. He cuts roses for the breakfast table on some midsummer mornings, when Frodo rises early and eats with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up for the already pressing, humid air, the linen bunched and furled like new leaves. His skin is very smooth beneath that cloth; Sam knows this from the occasions that he's happened to brush against it with his own, when they've reached for the same plate at the same time (begging your pardon) or Frodo makes Sam let him help with the weeding, which he hasn't any business doing with those fine hands of his, and he pulls up willowherb or foxglove every now and then instead of weeds, but it seems to make him happy, and for that Sam would quietly replant three dozen or more foxgloves.

Sam's hands are big and square and practical and not fine at all, but they are gentle. Gentle when he listens carefully to the roses and touches them so as not to harm, but to make them grow stronger, to bring out their beauty. Gentle, as he would be were he to lay them on Frodo's shoulders, on the nape of his neck beneath the very darkest of his sable curls, in the elegant curve of the small of his back, and on his thighs, where Sam thinks that Frodo's skin must be as silk-soft as a petal, except that, oh, he oughtn't to start thinking on that at all, because too many thoughts just as soon get away from you and turn into words, Samwise Gamgee, says his Gammer. And he hasn't the pretty words, like the elves wrote in Mr. Bilbo's old books, he only has his hands, but he can tend and he can grow.

And sometimes he wishes that he might press his mouth to Frodo's cheeks and eyelids the way the sweet clean late-April rain blesses the garden, nourishing without crushing, warm his body with his own, and, then feel all that is Frodo and will be ever after, opening for and with him like a newly-hatched butterfly, like the heart of a perfect blossom. Like one of his roses, beneath the sunshine.


The End