The soil here is rich enough to be almost black and is almost constantly moist. The maples average a height of 200' (61m) and some of the oaks can reach 400' (122m). The starwood is made up mostly of giant oaks and maple and is the most dense part of the forest. Some of the weirder vegetation includes beetle palm, foxberry and roseneedle pine. There is a wide variety of other vegetation (in part thanks to the rich soil) including chestnuts and red maples in the hills north of Mistledale, honeysuckle and snapdragons in meadows and cherry trees and blue cedars in groves near Essemore, and ivory moss, moonfern, alders, hickories and bitternuts.

It separates the rimwood from the starwood and accounts for roughly half of the total area of the forest. The trees here are packed densely enough to provide a mostly unbroken canopy. The midwood consists chiefly of white ash and beech. Major roads running through the rimwood include: Halfaxe Trail, Moander's Road, Moonsea Ride and Rauthauvyr's Road. Although the lack of vegetation causes a lack of animal species in the rimwood, insects such as beetles, lice, mosquitoes, red ants and red leafhoppers thrive here. The hillsides can be home to willow, spruce and clumps of wiregrass.

Because these pines drop slow-to-decompose needles on the forest floor, other foliage struggles to grow, except for softwood ferns. The main bulk of the trees are blueridge and needleleaf pines but they are spread quite far apart, rarely touching one another, and don't often grow over 20' (6m). The soil here is not rich in minerals and quite sandy, so it lacks the variety of vegetation found deeper in the forest. It is an area that runs around the edge of the forest a ten or twenty mile border between the interior forest and the rest of the world. The rimwood is mainly made up of pines and is the least dense part of the forest. The forest is also divided roughly according to tree types, with the following divisions: The first three of these four roughly correspond to the old elven communities of the same names. Although Cormanthor can be seen as one forest, it is actually made up of four forests: the Elven Court, Semberholme, the Tangled Trees and the Vale of Lost Voices.

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