Born Olenna Redwyne of the Arbor, daughter of Lord Runceford, betrothed at nine to Prince Daeron Targaryen and (by her own account) at pains to see the match come to nothing. The maesters wrote that Daeron broke it off when they were both eighteen in 246 AC; Olenna ever after spoke of the queer notions of the Targaryens and Baratheons, by which she meant the prince's appetites as plainly as she meant his madness. She was married instead to Luthor Tyrell, heir to Highgarden, himself spurned by a Targaryen betrothed, and bore him three children: Mace, Mina, and Janna. She allowed that she had loved Luthor well enough, kind as he was and not unskilled abed, but called him an oaf even so, for he rode off a cliff while hawking because he was watching the sky and not his horse.
A small, white-haired, wizened woman who smelled of rosewater and walked with a cane she half-feigned to need, older than Hoster Tully and sharper of tongue than most men a third her age, she came to be known up and down the Reach as the Queen of Thorns, a name she made a show of disliking. She kept twin guardsmen called Erryk and Arryk and named them Left and Right because she could not be troubled to tell them apart. Her son Mace, the lord oaf of Highgarden, she mocked openly and likened to a puff fish of the Summer Isles, regretting only that she had not beaten him oftener as a child; her granddaughter Margaery she guarded with all the cunning her son lacked. When Petyr Baelish came to Highgarden to broker the Lannister match, she asked him pointed questions about Joffrey's nature while he, behind her back, set rumors of the boy's cruelty whispering through her servants.
She came up to King's Landing in a wheelhouse carved with gilded roses to see Margaery wed to King Joffrey Baratheon, and at supper she sat Sansa Stark down with the jester Butterbumps singing loud enough to drown any listener and drew from the girl the truth of the king's beatings. With Petyr she had laid the matter already: at the wedding feast in the throne room she crossed to Sansa to offer her condolences for Robb and Catelyn, fussed at her wind-blown hair, and as she straightened the silver hairnet Dontos Hollard had given the girl, plucked from it the black amethyst that was no stone but a crystal of the strangler, and so did Joffrey choke and die over his pigeon pie while his mother screamed Tyrion's name. She remained at court to wring a swift wedding out of Cersei for Margaery and young Tommen, drove the queen hard on terms and on the bedding, paid offended tradesmen in light-weight Gardener gold she carried in a chest, and complained at the feast that The Rains of Castamere was not being sung enough, then returned to Highgarden with Ser Garlan the Gallant the morning after.