House Tyrell
Wardens of the South and Lords of Highgarden, stewards risen to rule the vast, fertile Reach ÔÇö second only to the Lannisters in wealth and first in men. A golden rose on green, they command the largest armies in the realm and the deepest granaries, and cultivate influence as carefully as their famous gardens.
The fuller tale
The Tyrells' whole claim to Highgarden rests on an inheritance other, older houses never quite forgave them for. Stewards to House Gardener, the ancient Kings of the Reach, the Tyrells took the castle and the title when the last Gardener king died fighting for the Targaryens at the Field of Fire ÔÇö a great house's fortune inherited by the family that had merely managed its household, while the Florents and Hightowers and Oakhearts, older blood by any measure the Reach cared about, watched a family of glorified caretakers become their liege lords overnight. Growing Highgarden, Reach nobility never entirely stopped viewing the Tyrells as upjumped stewards playing dress-up in a Gardener king's castle.
What the Tyrells lacked in ancient pedigree they made up for with the single largest granary and the single largest army in the Seven Kingdoms, and Olenna Tyrell ÔÇö the Queen of Thorns, sharp-tongued even by the standards of a family known for cultivated manners over blunt swords ÔÇö turned that leverage into the sharpest political instrument in King's Landing without ever picking up a weapon herself. The golden rose on green looks decorative next to a lion or a dragon; the house behind it understood, better than almost anyone else at court, that granaries and marriage contracts win wars just as reliably as armies do, usually with fewer funerals along the way.
The War of the Five Kings finds the Tyrells doing what the Tyrells do best: reading the room and switching horses at exactly the right moment. Margaery is betrothed first to Renly Baratheon for his claim and his charm, then ÔÇö the instant that claim dies with him ÔÇö remarried into the winning side, first to Joffrey, then to Tommen, each match managed by Olenna with the patience of a woman who has outlived every king she has ever needed to flatter. It works spectacularly, for a while: Highgarden's grain saves King's Landing from starvation, its army saves the city from Stannis's fleet at the Blackwater, and a Tyrell queen sits the throne beside a Lannister king who does whatever she and her grandmother suggest.
The house's undoing comes from the exact instrument Cersei borrowed to destroy it ÔÇö the Faith Militant, armed and unleashed specifically to break Tyrell influence over the throne, which promptly turns on its sponsor as readily as its intended target. Margaery is jailed, tried, humiliated in the streets alongside a queen who thought she was above such things; and when Cersei finally answers the threat of trial with an ocean of wildfire beneath the Great Sept of Baelor, the explosion that follows does not spare the Tyrells who came to watch. Olenna alone survives it, briefly, long enough to hand Jaime Lannister a confession ÔÇö the truth of Joffrey's poisoning, delivered with her family already in ashes and nothing left to lose ÔÇö and to drink the poison that finishes Highgarden's siege on her own terms rather than her enemies'. By the war's end the golden rose has no one left to fly it.
The page and the screen
This is arguably the single widest divergence for any great house in the saga, simply because of pacing: the show writes House Tyrell's entire destruction ÔÇö the Faith Militant crisis, the sept's detonation, Olenna's poisoning of Joffrey confessed and avenged, Highgarden besieged and looted by Jaime Lannister ÔÇö inside about two seasons. The published books have not remotely caught up; the Faith Militant conflict is still unfolding as of the last volume, the Great Sept has not been destroyed on the page, Margaery's trial has not concluded, and Olenna Tyrell is alive and scheming with the Reach's full strength still behind her. Readers of the books have, in effect, watched an entire great house rise and fall on screen that the novels have not yet finished introducing.
