Highgarden

Seat of House Tyrell

A castle of white towers and climbing roses above the Mander, heart of the garden of Westeros.

The fuller tale

Highgarden sits above the Mander on a green hill in the richest country in Westeros, and looks it: white towers wound with climbing roses, three concentric walls, a briar maze grown as much for beauty as defense, and fields beyond the walls that feed half the realm. This was the seat of the Gardener kings, who ruled the Reach for thousands of years from a throne of living wood until the last of them burned with his host on the Field of Fire. Aegon handed the empty castle to the Gardeners' stewards ÔÇö and House Tyrell has spent three centuries being magnificently, productively sensitive about the word. Growing Strong, their banners insist; upjumped stewards, their rivals murmur; both are true, which is the joke and the wound at once.

The Tyrell method is the castle made policy. Where the Lannisters mint power and the Starks inherit it, Highgarden grows it ÔÇö marriages planted like orchards, hospitality as statecraft, and always, underneath the courtesy, the hardest arithmetic in the realm being done by whoever holds the rose. In the tale that is chiefly the Queen of Thorns, who conducts the family's real business from a shaded garden while her amiable son collects titles, and whose two great transactions bracket the war: a granddaughter married to one king in the Reach's own camp, then, when a shadow ends that venture, the same granddaughter delivered to King's Landing with the food that ends a siege and the roses that redecorate a throne room. Highgarden never fields the largest ambitions, only the largest harvest ÔÇö and the harvest, as the Blackwater proves, is an army.

For most of the story the castle itself stays offstage, a wellspring the plot draws on without visiting ÔÇö the wagons of bread that make Margaery beloved, the hundred thousand swords everyone is forever courting, the strawberries and sisters Loras name-drops at tourneys. The show finally opens the gates only to sack them: with the Tyrell heirs dead in the sept's ashes, Jaime Lannister and the Tarly levies take the castle almost as an errand, and the last of the roses drinks poison across a table from the man she has been fencing with for seven seasons, settling the score with the most satisfying exit line in the series. The gold of Highgarden pays Lannister debts; the granary of the Reach becomes a war asset; the castle passes, at the end, to a new lord whose qualifications are a hammer and a good heart.

Highgarden's meaning in the tale is the fate of soft power in a hard age. The Tyrells play the game better than nearly anyone ÔÇö patient, liquid, universally pleasant ÔÇö and it buys them three royal marriages and a decade at the center of everything; and then a single morning of wildfire deletes the whole position, because charm and wheat have no answer to an enemy who stops caring about the rules. What survives of the rose is what was always realest about it: the fields. Armies burn, queens fall, houses end ÔÇö the Reach still feeds the realm, whoever collects the rents.

The page and the screen

In the books Highgarden remains unvisited and untaken ÔÇö a described paradise the reader, like most of Westeros, knows only by reputation, with Olenna alive, Willas and Garlan Tyrell (two brothers the show cut entirely) in the line of succession, and the Reach's real emergency coming not from Lannister columns but from the ironborn: Euron's longships are savaging its coasts and islands, and the rose's strength is marching the wrong way when the fourth book leaves it. The show's swift sack of the castle ÔÇö and Olenna's poisoned exit with its famous confession ÔÇö is screen invention from the walls up, efficient, memorable, and impossible in the books' geography, where readers have been promised the Reach's war but not yet shown it.

The chronicle here

The shadow kills Renly in his own tent; his hundred thousand scatter to Stannis and Highgarden. (S2┬ÀE5)
Dany's war council divides the war: Dorne and Highgarden strangle King's Landing; the Unsullied take Casterly Rock. (S7┬ÀE2)
The Unsullied take Casterly Rock and find it hollow ÔÇö the Lannister army is at Highgarden. (S7┬ÀE3)
The Queen of Thorns asks Sansa plainly what Joffrey is; the truth ÔÇö ÔÇ£a monsterÔÇØ ÔÇö buys her a Highgarden dream: gentle Willas, and roses instead of lions. (ASOS 7)