One of the fascinating parts of Lord of the Rings is the insight into different characters temptations - especially when tempted by the ring.  Much is made of Gandalf's and Galadriel's and even Aragorn's temptations... but today I came across Sam's--and it blew my mind!

A little background... it's the chapter entitled "The Tower of Cirith Ungol" where Sam is going to rescue Frodo, but he has the ring and wears it to get past some of the orcs.  And thus begins the temptation of Samwise:

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason.  Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to overthrow Barad-dur.  And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at the his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit.  He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be. 

In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his hear that he was not large enough to bear such a burden... The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.

So precious!  But also convicting - am I content with my "one small garden"?

Oh, Tolkien, you never cease to amaze!

[T-26 hours till some more Tolkien amaze takes place :]

Glorious day!

 Today was so fabulous. 80º and sunny in Seattle.

Here are just some moments of the day:

[beautiful campus... only 3 weeks left here]

[Mt. Rainier in the distance =]

[Bare-feet in the quad... reminded me of Magdalen's quad]

[I Believe in Sherlock Holmes - made my day even brighter!]

[They did good =]

[a bit of folk in the city]

[Julia!!]

[happy hour at Cafe Campagne (again) - sooo good!]

[finally got to garden! My dad and I planted the flowers I bought for Mother's Day]

[peonies are coming!!!]

I have a new favorite joy: flower shopping.

In fact, I think I'm going to take up gardening. Today is my mom's birthday and the only thing she asked for was flowers to plant in her front garden beds. Every year she buys the same flowers, and they're cute, but I reeeally wanted to experiment with other things. Now, I hardly knew anything (still don't know much) about flowers and gardening. So I headed off to a local nursery. A really nice older lady helped educate me on a bunch of different types of flowers. But the best part was picking out the variety of flowers. I bought 9 plants in 5 varieties. My favorite was a stunning corally-orange geranium!!

It was such a blast. Plus I get to go back and buy more flowers today! Hopefully planting them goes well. I have the spacing planned out and I think it will be gogeous.

I'm just praying that she likes them since they aren't what she would normally pick out. But I'm hoping she's willing to try these.

I told my younger sister that we should pool our money together and make up a pot of flowers.

PS... she LOVED them!!!

Check out some of my favorite flowers =)

If you've followed my blog for a while, you will know that I love corally pink peonies!

I just can't fathom how one flower can contain all those petals. The Lord gave me some revelation regarding this particular flower which you can read about here.

My mom has a peony bush. The color is more of a light pink, but they're still gorgeous. The stems are growing rapidly and a month from now we should start to enjoy the first bloom =)

I'm not exactly sure why, but I'm very drawn to coral :)

This is the geranium I was talking about earlier. Isn't the color captivating??

Ok... I think I have new 2nd favorite flower (peonies always being the first :)

This is a white non-stop begonia. I love it! I bought one of these for my mom too. I think it looks very rose like.

Oh and finally, these are juliet-orange diascias. I bought one of these as well. What I hadn't noticed, because ours haven't bloomed yet, is that they petals are actually asymetrical. What a lovely effect!

Ok... just a few faves. As gardening is my current obsession, you may see more on this in the near future. Oh, and I'll try to put up a picture of what my mom's flower beds look like once we've planted everything =)