Treebeard boasted to Merry and Pippin about the strength of the Ents. He said that they were much more powerful than Trolls, which Morgoth (in the Elder Days or First Age) supposedly made as imitations of the Ents, but did not come near to their power. He compares this with how Orcs were Morgoth's imitation of Elves. There used to be Entwives (literally "ent-women"), but they started to move farther away from the Ents because they liked to plant and control things, so they moved away to the region that would later become the Brown Lands across the Great River Anduin. This area was destroyed by Sauron, and the Entwives disappeared. The Ents looked for them, but have never found them. It is sung by the Ents that one day they will find each other, when they lose all else. In the Fellowship of the Ring, Sam Gamgee says his cousin Hal saw a walking tree in the north of the Shire. When Pippin and Merry tell Treebeard about the Shire, Treebeard says the Entwives would like that land, suggesting Hal saw either an Entwife or a Huorn. It is safe to say that with no Entwives and their slow decline with time, numbers of the Ents had dwindled by the end of the Third Age. According to Treebeard there are no Entings upon Middle-earth at the time of the Third Age, and there have not been any for quite some time. And there will never be any more Entings afterwards either, "as there are no Entwives". What exactly happened to the Entwives was something Tolkien wanted to keep a mystery, even to himself, but in one of his letters he said, "I think that in fact the Entwives have disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance."
