The Green Man Appeals to Our Basic Gardener Instincts

I come by my obsession with leaves honestly. From ancient times, temples and public structures were covered with vines, acanthus and other leaves.  Beginning around the  2nd century  AD, plant life in architecture took a most unusual turn. Funerary monuments in Germany and elsewhere started to depict a leafy figure know as the “Green Man”.  Sometimes the Green Man appeared like a face peering through leaves and foliage.  Other times the face itself—mouth and nostrils, even ears—were spewing lush trails of foliage.

By the 4th century, this strange pagan symbol had begun to appear as decorative carvings in German and French Christian funeral monuments. Beginning in the 6th century, the Green Man even popped up as carvings in churches and private homes.  Eventually the images appeared as far afield as England and Istanbul.  But suddenly around 500 years later—in the 11th century—the Green Man seems to have gone out of favor. If it still was used, the strange figure tended to be squirreled away in a corner or under the eaves.

To this day, scholars are obsessed by the mystery.  Some believe the Green Man represents the God of the Forest (Sylvanus) and others say he is a satyr. Some have tied the Green Man to the myth of John Barleycorn, others to the Arthurian and Robin Hood legends. Still others connect him to the Jack-in-the-Green May festivals and morris dancing. In recent years, gardeners and artists have rediscovered the Green Man and most garden catalogs carry an assortment of items including garden statuary depicting that mystifying face.

It is no surprise that gardeners have adopted that very ancient symbol of some kind of rebirth or renewal as their own. On some very deep and meaningful level, that is what gardens are all about.