Greenwild

Indigo Podsnap is Daisy’s first friend when she arrives in the Greenwild, and he quickly becomes one of her strongest allies in her quest to find the kidnapped Botanists. Indigo and Daisy bond over their shared sense of being outsiders. While Daisy feels disconnected from the other Botanists because she has been raised with no knowledge of the Greenwild, Indigo feels isolated because his talent is with animals rather than plants.

The inability of the Mallowmarsh residents to see the value of Indigo’s talents indicates the depth of their biases. By contrast, Daisy is able to embrace the value of Indigo’s magic because she did not grow up in the plant-focused Mallowmarsh community, and her positive regard helps  Indigo to gain confidence in himself. Indigo feels highly validated when his fathers both return from the Amazon and report that they have found other Botanists who have similar talents with animals. Their efforts to provide him with suitable teachers help him to feel supported and prove that he is not alone in his skills. Indigo frequently fills a supporting role in Daisy’s adventures, introducing her to different members of Mallowmarsh society and explaining key aspects of green magic. He therefore serves a pedagogical role for Thomson’s readers as well, delivering crucial exposition about the magical world of Greenwild through lively dialogue that reduces the novel’s reliance upon lengthy passages of exposition.

Eggbertina “the Professor” Bellamy is one of Daisy’s friends, and she also serves as the de facto leader of the children’s so-called Five O’Clock Club, in which Daisy, Indigo, Acorn, and the Prof come together daily to discuss Mallowmarsh news. Like Daisy, the Prof is personally connected to the disappearances in the Amazon; her grandfather is among the vanished Botanists. While the Prof cares about the children’s mission to rescue the missing Botanists, she is reluctant to break school rules because doing so puts her in danger of not being admitted to Bloomquist, the advanced academy for green magic. The Prof is the star student of the Mallowmarsh school, but she still feels a great deal of pressure to gain access to the elite Bloomquist, as her parents and grandfather were all lauded students at the school.

The Prof’s nickname comes from her talent in academics and the many languages that she speaks. She confides in Daisy that she initially disliked her nickname, but she now sees it as a sign of other people’s respect and affection for her. The Prof’s emotional development occurs when she eventually decides that helping the missing Botanists is more important than following rules. She is also fiercely protective of Acorn, the youngest member of the Five O’Clock Club.

The friction between the Prof and her Aunt Elspeth also highlights the various class issues and elitist attitudes that pervade certain quarters of Mallowmarsh. Aunt Elspeth wants the Prof to associate with Ivy Helix, who is a member of one of Mallowmarsh’s oldest families. However, the Prof resists this injunction because she is disgusted with Ivy’s bullying ways. The Prof becomes increasingly determined to stand up for her desire to choose her own friends, and her decisive actions become a cornerstone of the novel’s climax.

Hal White is the childhood version of Daisy’s father, whom she meets in the secret garden after inadvertently making a wish for help upon the magical wishing pomegranate. Hal and Daisy first meet when she hears him crying; his father (who is eventually revealed to be the surly Sheldrake) cruelly dismisses him, criticizing his intelligence and disregarding his concerns about the Grim Reapers. Hal plans to protect endangered species when he grows up, and he wants to focus particularly on plants that members of the illicit Darkmarket plan to destroy in order to artificially raise the prices on other specimens.

Daisy learns that Hal’s timeline takes place 30 years before her own and that he was eventually killed by Cardew, his best friend. Cardew betrayed Hal for profit when Hal discovered a rare ghost orchid, and when he was banished to the Grayside for his crime, he later styled himself “Craven,” becoming the overarching antagonist of the novel.

Daisy soon learns that she cannot tell Hal anything she knows about his future, as the magic of the secret garden prohibits her from revealing such sensitive information. Similarly, she cannot tell anyone in Mallowmarsh about Hal until after the secret garden disappears entirely. Throughout the novel, Hal primarily serves as a narrative device that allows the author to gradually reveal the details of Daisy’s background. He also teaches her about different aspects of green magic.

Mr. Craven, who is known in the Greenwild as Cardew, is the primary antagonist in the novel. He first presents himself as Leila’s editor at The High Herald, but the narrative soon reveals that he only took this role to kidnap Leila and various other Botanists. In his youth, Cardew was the best friend of Hal Thistledown, Daisy’s father, whom he killed along with several other Botanists in order to steal a rare ghost orchid. In punishment, he was stripped of his green magic and banished from the Greenwild, and he now holds a grudge against this magical world and everyone in it. Cardew is also motivated by capitalistic greed and wantonly destroys aspects of the natural world for his own gain. (This motivation also held true for his younger self, for he initially turned to crime when Hal discovered a rare ghost orchid: a flower that grants extra years of life to someone by taking that same amount of time from the person they love most.)

By allying with Matron Daggler, who resents her meager amount of green magic, Cardew steals Daisy’s dandelight, an object that allows him to travel to the Greenwild even though he lacks green magic. Once there, he tries to destroy the Heart Oak, the very center of Greenwild magic. However, Daisy uses her own magic to defeat him after she lures him to the roof of the Great Glasshouse and uses vines to break the greenhouse, leaving Cardew to plunge to his death.

Commander Artemis White is one of the most reliable adults and allies that Daisy meets in the Greenwild. Artemis leads Mallowmarsh, a role that ties her magic directly to the Heart Oak, the center of all green magic in Mallowmarsh. Artemis is supportive of Daisy from the first moment that the protagonist arrives in Mallowmarsh, and she actively defends Daisy against Sheldrake and Ivy’s xenophobic suspicions and accusations.

Despite Artemis’s open support of Daisy and Indigo, the children do not always turn to her for help because they know that Artemis will seek to protect them from gaining the knowledge that they need in order to solve the mystery of the disappearing Botanists. Yet despite her misguided but well-meaning attempts to thwart the children’s quest, Daisy and her friends still respect Artemis; this dynamic becomes clear when they feel guilty over having earned her disappointment upon breaking the rules of the community and pursuing rash adventures.

Artemis is eventually revealed to be Daisy’s grandmother. Daisy’s real name, Diana, is an allusion to this relationship, as Diana and Artemis are the respective Roman and Greek names for the goddess of the hunt. Artemis is also Hal’s mother, and she deeply regrets that her husband at the time, Sheldrake, alienated Hal with his verbal and emotional abuse. Artemis is nearly killed when Cardew cuts down the Heart Oak in the novel’s climax, but Daisy’s magical resurrection of the tree allow Artemis to recover from this attack.