The mythical High King of the First Men, said to have been the common ancestor of half the noble houses of the Reach — the Gardeners, Tyrells, Florents, and more — through his firstborn son Garth the Gardener, who founded House Gardener and the line of the Kings of the Reach. The tales of Garth are tangled and contradictory. Some name him the warchief who led the First Men across the Arm of Dorne; others claim he came before them, the first and only man in Westeros, who walked among the children of the forest and the giants. In the oldest stories he is no man at all but a green god who died with each autumn and was reborn with the spring, demanding blood sacrifice for a bountiful harvest, and was variously depicted with green hands, green hair, green skin, or the antlers of a stag, crowned with vines and flowers and making the land bloom where he walked.
It was Garth, the legends hold, who first taught men to farm — to plant and sow and reap — carrying an endless canvas sack heavy with the seed of every tree, grain, fruit, and flower, scattering it so that farms and orchards sprang up behind him. He brought fertility to women as well as to fields, quickening the barren and the aged with a touch, so that lords and smallfolk alike are said to have offered up their maiden daughters to him for the sake of their crops. His many children — among them Garth the Gardener, John the Oak, Gilbert of the Vines, Florys the Fox, and Brandon of the Bloody Blade — are named the founders of the great Reach houses. The maesters, ever skeptical, hold that he was no god at all but merely a petty king or warchief of the first wave of First Men, his divinity a thing grown in the retelling.