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On the ceiling in the church at the centre of my village in Devon there is a wooden boss that depicts a face – human-like, with vegetation spilling from his mouth and curling around his cheeks. He is not serene. He seems like he has been interrupted. He is the Green Man – a symbol of rebirth and a connection to the natural world, often found in architecture and folklore. He has been there since medieval craftspeople set him in place, watching the village go about its patterns of birth and death and ordinary days. There is something in his expression that seems insistent; he seems to say pay attention.
I suspect that David Gee’s Wildest Dream is the book that face has been waiting for. Published posthumously – Gee completed it just weeks before his death in 2024 – it is an act of care: a writer at the end of his life reaching back through stories and centuries in order to pose questions about our relationship with each other and with the planet. Gee reminds us that life in abundance is always available.
This book is not a straightforward history of the Green Man. It ranges widely from Mesopotamian vegetation gods and Merlin to the May festivals of medieval England and the road protests of the 1990s, from Robin Hood to contemporary ecological movements. Gee attempts to recover a way of seeing that modern culture seems to be working hard to forget. The Green Man, Gee argues, is not an oddity stuck in sculptures – he is a recurring figure in the human story, surfacing whenever something is at risk of being forgotten.
What Gee calls “wildness” is not chaos, nor is it the romance of mountains and moors and solitude. It is something more available to us: the capacity to be deeply affected by the living world, and to refuse the slow numbing that can pass for modern life. He traces this thread through peasant revolts and protest songs, through carvings on church walls and seasonal rituals that survived official suppression by going underground and re-emerging in new forms. The Green Man keeps coming back, and Gee reads this as testimony to the part of us that knows what we are at risk of losing if we pay no heed.
Here in Devon I see other versions of the Green Man, like Old Crockern, the spirit of Dartmoor. He’s a guardian figure, and as well as protector of Dartmoor, he is Dartmoor itself given eyes, movement and rage. I think Gee might recognise him; he is one of many figures that help us to “allow the living world into our inward parts, face up to the forces that would see it all paved over, and negotiate”.
The book ends with a pilgrimage from Edinburgh to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. In the face of a disappearing future, gestures of lifegiving belonging and care like this are “the beating heart of real hope”, and these acts might do more than grand redemption narratives that expect to “seize the future and save the world”.
There is an emotional weight to the book that comes partly from its context. Gee wrote it knowing he was dying, but it is a book of hope more than resignation. He wanted readers to feel their own love for the life within them and around them, and to live out of that knowing. Wide in its reach, yet intimate in its address, this is a book that can change how you move through the world. Wildest Dream left me feeling what it means to be alive and able to respond in a world that is asking something of us all.
Wildest Dream: An Imagined History of the Green Man by David Gee. Ember Press, 2025. ISBN: 9781068465901
