And Now, Some Words from the Red Book

     "So they passed into the northern marches of that land that Men once called Ithilien, a fair country of climbing woods and swift-falling streams.  The night became fine under star and round moon, and it seemed to the hobbits that the fragrance of the air grew as they went forward; and from the blowing and muttering of Gollum it seemed that he noticed it too, and did not relish it.  At the first signs of day they halted again.  They had come to the end of a long cutting, deep, and sheer-sided in the middle, by which the road clove its way through a stony ridge.  Now they climbed up the westward bank and looked abroad.
     "Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in the distance.  Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down into dim hazes far below.  All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs.  The long journey from Rivendell had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of clime.  Here Spring was already busy about them:  fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing.  Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.
     "South and west it looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Duath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away.  Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam.  The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops.  Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass:  deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin."

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King, Book Four, Part IV:  'Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit'