beginnings in search of a plot

I have a couple of different premises bouncing around my mind. They involve roughly the same character, at about ten years' difference, but very different genres. Here are some mullings, and a scrap of the first.

***

I've been rereading The Lord of the Rings, quite slowly. One of the things I'm noticing is the amount that Tolkien knows about plants; his many emulators aren't nearly as good at landscape, at the sense of actual place, and in part that may be because they don't know what half of those trees are. I'm no good at trees, though I ought to be, since my mother is a gardener on a grand scale. I do know one landscape well, though. It isn't at all European, but I wonder . . . Does that matter?

What follows is a scrap of classic high fantasy, set essentially in my home town. The main character is not me, nor is her mother my mother.

***

( Marta and the goblin )