[Pitchwife]

Intriguing topic! I can't claim to be an expert on flowers either (although married to a passionate gardener), but I know a couple and am rather fond of them. I approve of their inclusion in Tolkien's work because they add to the realism/credibility of the secondary world (especially the invented ones). It would be a strange world that had no flowers. Putting flowers in Middle-earth, and inventing new ones for it, is just one aspect of the Professor's attention to nature, to the visible world, which makes his subcreation so convincing.

But there's more than that. To me, Tolkien's flowers sort of embody the genius loci, the spirit of the place where they grow. Try to imagine Lothlorien without elanor and niphredil, gold and white! Their colours mirror the silver and gold of the mallorn trees, and together they set the visual key for the whole location, embodied again in Galadriel's white dress and golden hair! The whole country is white or grey and golden in my mind's eye.

The Morgul flowers are the evil counterpoint to this, their white a spectral, leprous colour. A corruption of what is often considered fairest in nature, they're easily the creepiest thing in the whole description of the Morgul vale, far creepier than the rotating tower head or the twisted statues. Brr.

Then there's of course simbelmyne, rooted in the graves of dead kings and emblematic of the history of Rohan, and probably more than escape me now. But the flower moment that came first to my mind when I saw this topic is the seregon, the red flower mantling the top of Amon Rûdh in the story of Túrin, presaging the brutal fate of his band: "Blood on the hill-top"... This scene and Andróg's words never fail to give me the shivers at every reread.

(The new avvie, if anyone's wondering, is no Tolkien flower but the Siebenstern ("Sevenfold Star", Trientalis europaea), emblem of the Fichtelgebirge, the hills where I grew up.)