No, the plants were fine. Magically. This is also how the plants were fine on the other continent which had no daylight.

"Right. Magic fixes everything, huh?" Shavri sits back and eats in silence for a bit. 

By and large.

"You know," Vanyel says finally, "on net, I think I prefer our world without all the magic fixes. Because the gods were awfully bossy about Arda, and they kicked you out in the end. That's a pretty high price to pay for perfect weather and magically sustained plants." 

In Valinor nobody dies. Nobody's hungry. Nobody's in danger.

But they're safe and they have enough of everything.

"...That's pretty fair." He still seems uneasy. "But the gods could... Have they never broken things? Decided they wanted the world a different way than what was good for people? Maybe they are just good, but I don't think I'd trust the gods of our world with that much." 

No, the Valar do make mistakes, and not just with me. It's not perfect. Though there are fourteen of them and I don't know if they always agree on everything they do. I don't know what your gods think they're doing.

"I haven't got the faintest idea either. They don't really keep us informed." He switches to private Mindspeech. :I don't think Leareth likes them much: 

No? Why not? she replies equally privately.

:...It's mostly a feeling I get, more than a specific thing he's said. He did say something like, if the gods had our, humanity's, well, humans and all the other species, our best interests at heart, then the world would look different? But the rest is just - I mean, he made himself immortal however many centuries ago because he thought the world was terrible in a bunch of ways and nobody else would fix it if he didn't. That's...not the act of someone who trusts the gods to be good, right?:

I'm not sure how powerful your gods are. I know the Materian ones aren't moral, at least in a conventional sense, even the ones who call themselves good. The Valar might just be... slow.

:I don't know how powerful our gods are either: Vanyel admits. :Though...: and he hesitates for a while, :I...wonder if they're responsible for me. For my Gifts, I mean. For, um, what happened. With Tylendel. The Tayledras believe lifebonds happen when the gods are meddling directly, and...: again he stares at his hands in silence for a bit, :and, my friend Moondance has something like Foresight. He Saw – I don't know, it wasn't clear to him, but a pattern where I was important. It's all really confusing but with the Foresight dream, I think that maybe the gods created - not me, but me as a mage – to fight him. Leareth: 

He turns his head away, looking at the distant river. :...But then I don't understand why They're letting us talk. What that adds: 

Well, why do the Tayledras believe that?

:...I don't know: he admits, sheepish. :Never asked. It's, um, not a topic I ever wanted to think about. Before. It's less of a sore point now: 

Shavri has been pretty patient with the Mindspeech conversation, but finally interrupts. "Van, weren't you going to play the lute for us?" 

"Oh. Right." He seems relieved at the change of topic, and gets the instrument out of its case to start tuning it.

Bella flops onto her back to listen.

Vanyel plays three or four songs from something called the 'Windrider Cycle', which he says is a semi-historical ballad from the early history of Valdemar. 

He sets the lute down to stretch his fingers. "...Bella, do you sing or play any instruments?" 

I can sing a little. I lived with Elves too long to not pick up any at all, though I never got any of the singing spells to work. But Shavri said I should show you a memory of Elf singing and that's way better.

He lights up. "Oh! Can you? I would love to see, er, hear that." 

"Sure."

And here is a concert, in as high fidelity as she can manage, of an Elf choir.

"This is amazing..." And then Vanyel will keep listening in awed, delighted silence, beaming at her, as long as Bella is willing to keep it up. 

She can do it all lunch, though she will bounce around between songs as she forgets lyrics and picks up with other memories instead. This was Rúmil's favorite; this is the healing song she can't get working; this is the one for walking on water.

Vanyel doesn't interrupt during, he's too busy listening to the beautiful music, but when they're packing up the hamper he asks: "So some of those are spells? ...Do you think they'd work here, if I tried to learn them? Er, I have perfect pitch, I can pick songs up pretty easily." To demonstrate, he closes his eyes and sings a couple lines of the healing one, spot-on for pitch, though he's not quite getting the word-pronunciation. 

If you want to learn a song's worth of Quenya lyrics by rote more precisely than that and can sing as well as an Elf, probably it'd work.