gardening on Middle Earth
Plants and flowers are key to bringing a storybook fantasy to life.
Many New Zealanders will be familiar with Hobbiton’s back story. In 1998 a film location scout knocked on the door of the Alexander family home and said he thought their farm, surrounded by Matamata’s rolling hills and with the Kaimai Ranges in the distance, might make an ideal spot to film some of the scenes in the Lord of
the Rings feature films since it so resembled the Shire, the region of Middle Earth settled by hobbits in John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s richly imagined fictional world.
Site construction began the following year, and later in 1999, filming on the Lord of the Rings trilogy began. The set was designed to be temporary – it was built mainly from plywood and Styrofoam – so was deconstructed when filming finished. Nonetheless, the spot became popular with tourists, and the Alexanders started leading tours along the winding paths between empty hobbit holes.
But in 2011 the set here was rebuilt, this time of more permanent materials, so The Hobbit trilogy of films could be shot. As well as building and refitting the hobbit holes, a bridge, a mill and even a pub (the Green Dragon) were built. But living landscape needed to be created with plants too: from the gardens outside the different residences, to the hobbits’ communal vege garden. One of the art directors on The Hobbit films Brian Massey – who was involved in creating the 2004 gold medal-winning Chelsea Flower Garden, 100% Pure New Zealand Ora Garden of Well-being, the first New Zealand garden ever at that event – oversaw the establishment of more than a kilometre of hedges and shifted mature trees to the site, including large fruit trees from Pippins Orchard in Matamata and a 35-tonne tree from a neighbouring farm that took two bulldozers and a few diggers to shift.
Visitors to Hobbiton now step straight into Tolkien’s imagination and wander among a fully realised world.
“People come to catch a glimpse of what they have seen in the movies and read in the books,” Hobbiton’s head gardener Pam Russ says. “But I’m not sure they are expecting to see as much as they do. You do hear gasps when they come through the cuttings and see the gardens and the plants.”
There are no actual hobbits at Hobbiton. But Pam, along with the other staff here, refers so easily to these imaginary creatures you could be forgiven for thinking there were.
Hobbits are keen gardeners, Pam says. “Hobbit holes have a garden out the front. Hobbits love herbs, they like being able to harvest a few herbs for tea. They are very fond of food so they sometimes have their own vege patch, and there’s a communal vege garden too. And they like flowers, mainly the cottage style of flowers.”
There are more than 40 hobbit holes here. Most have a garden, but hobbits – like people – don’t all garden in the same way. “Some hobbits keep their gardens very tidy, some of them are hard-working. Some might have gone off for the day, so their garden might have got a bit overgrown. There’s even one hobbit hole which is home to a drunken hobbit who does no work on his garden whatsoever. There are bottles lying in the long grass and weeds growing up by the door!
“But generally, in between the eating and the sleeping and the drinking, hobbits do quite a lot of gardening.”
But then Tolkien must have been a keen gardener too. In The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings he describes all sorts of trees, shrubs, flowers and edible plants. Some of them of course, he imagined – so alas, you will look in vain at Hobbiton for any example of the genus of luminiferous trees that illuminated the Blessed Realm of Valinor, and nor will you find any sapient willows.
But Tolkien mentioned many real plants too – heather, ivy, roses, tobacco (or as the hobbits call it, pipe weed),
“Hobbits are definitely keen gardeners. In between the eating and the sleeping and the drinking, they do quite a lot of gardening!”
“We are a bit wary about growing anything too modern. But what do you class as modern really, given hobbits don’t actually exist?”
daisies, laburnum, snapdragons, nasturtium, ferns, moss, chestnuts, yew, (non-sapient) willows and more. The set designers and gardeners used those plants as a starting point when planting the garden spaces here. But hobbits’ gardens – like all our gardens – also change and evolve.
“Tolkien mentions the hobbits growing potatoes and carrots,” Pam says. “But if you watch the movie you see the hobbits eating meals with various other vegetables which Tolkien didn’t mention but they were in the films, so we plant those too. And then over the years we try new things because hobbits are gardeners, and gardeners do like to try new things.”
There was quite a debate among the garden team, Pam says, about whether hobbits would grow aubergines, but it was pointed out that they grew and loved potatoes which were carried to Europe by explorers at a similar time.
“We’re a bit wary of growing anything too modern,” she explains. “But what do you class as modern really, given hobbits don’t actually exist?”
But the gardens and planted spaces at Hobbiton are created not just for the (imaginary) hobbits, but for the (real) visitors who continue to flock to the site.
“We try to have the gardens looking as good as they can all of the time,” says Pam, who trained as a horticulturist in the UK before moving to New Zealand 15 years ago. “Mostly you let a garden go through a period where it is dormant. But at Hobbiton we try and have something interesting going on at all times. Which can be tricky but it means we are always learning and trying new things.”
The aim however, she says, is never to keep the gardens here looking perfect since hobbits tend to prefer a more
romantic and dishevelled style. A lot of colonising plants have been allowed to naturalise – nasturtiums, borage, lemon balm and comfrey – and edible plants are deliberately let go to seed to bring in bees and butterflies.
“Plus there are lazy hobbits,” Pam says. “If you look in the communal garden, you will see some patches are very tidy and the next patch has a few weeds coming through. In a way the gardeners here can get away with murder. Because if we haven’t had the time to do something, we just blame the hobbits for being lazy!”
The gardeners at Hobbiton grow some of the plants they need at their nursery, which is just off site. The team’s numbers fluctuate according to the seasons and what needs doing, but at its core are five or six gardeners. “Right now we are really cranking out plants in the nursery, because we are growing sunflowers, gourds and pumpkins, cucumbers and zinnias for summer. But we buy plants in punnets or as potted colour too – hobbits are known to shop at Mitre 10 and Bunnings, and they like going to the new Oderings in Cambridge for annuals!”
At the moment the nursery is also packed with hundreds of shrubs and flowering plants being grown for a garden, designed by Brian Massey, that will be on display at the New Zealand Flower & Garden Show at Auckland’s Trusts Stadium from November 29 until December 3. The 10m x 10m garden, which will feature a full-sized hobbit hole, is home to a bee-keeping hobbit, Pam says. She and her team have been transplanting comfrey and mint plants from the Hobbiton site, as well as striking cuttings or growing from seed the other plants they will need, including nasturtiums, snapdragons, Nicotiana tabacum (aka pipe weed), sunflowers, lots of vegetables and berry bushes, and plenty of climbing jasmine.
The show garden will need well-established plants, and Pam and the team want them to immediately look like they have been growing in situ for years. They are trying all sorts of techniques to achieve that effect, including training climbing scrambling plants such as nasturtiums along strings. “We have done tests where we let the strings down and drape the plants and within 24 hours they look as if they have always been there.”
There’s a fruit tree in this show garden too – five trees were lifted from Pippins Orchard in winter so they could be readied for transport. Two will be taken to Auckland where the best one will eventually be part of the show garden. Brian and Hobbiton’s site manager Drew Fraser toured the orchard to find trees that the right star quality.
“We just managed to lift them while they were still dormant,” Pam says. “They are coming into leaf and flower now. They all have crazy shapes to them but that is not how they have been pruned, it’s how they grew.”
Gardening at Hobbiton is as much art direction as horticulture, Pam admits, but as all gardeners know, plants can be difficult to direct and always have the ability to surprise. And while the built elements are important, it is the plants that – literally – bring Tolkien’s vision to life.
“It’s a totally different way of gardening,” Pam admits. “But it’s never, ever boring!”