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Jack-in-the-Green
(a.k.a. The Green Man, The Green Knight, Green George, John Barleycorn)

If you've ever set foot in a medieval cathedral, or taken a stroll in a Victorian-style garden, or wandered the streets of an ancient Mediterranean hill town, you've seen the face of Jack-in-the-Green. You may not have given him much thought, however: his face is so widely recognized that it seems as ordinary a decoration as a cross or a garden gnome. A smiling, stern, or leering visage, with leafy brows and cheeks, chin and hair that recede into foliage, good old Jack is a personification of Nature itself, half-man and half-plant.

The rest of Jack's body is similarly constructed - leaves of many shapes and shades of green growing out of and covering a man-shaped body, like feathers or scales. His moustache is a twin pair of weeping willow sprays, his eyebrows two stern oak leaves, and his long beard and hair are both a mass of tangled vegetation. His dark emerald eyes are small and deep, with no whites or pupils, and seem at times to be no more than hollow pits into a void of deep vegetative thoughts. He stands very tall, seven and a half feet at least, but stoops a little with the weight of a thousand thousand years of unseen care for the plant kingdom.

Jack-in-the-Green wears a checkered surcoat and tunic, leggings, a hooded cloak, heavy gloves, and pointed boots in varying shades of greenish-brown. An antediluvian stone dagger and axe rest at his belt (gifts from a Druid in ages past), and a crude yew longbow hangs on his back, its wood still occasionally sending forth new twigs and leaves. He is a terrible shot with it, however, and does not tip his arrows with steel, but merely sharpens the shafts themselves - metalworking is foreign to him. He leans on a thin, gnarled, still-living tree instead of a staff; wherever he sets its end down, its stubby roots take hold in the soil, and it is crowned with a small canopy of ever-rustling leaves. He seems to recall owning a suit of full plate armour carved from bark, and a wooden broadsword, but has forgotten where they lie in the vast forests of the world.

(Take this figure, give him this face and dress him in the outfit on the left, and you're not far off the mark.)

Jack-in-the-Green speaks in a voice that seems to encompass all the sounds of the forest and the field: the rustle of wind in the branches of a hoary oak, the whisper of secretive long grasses, and the creak and groan of immeasurably aged tree trunks. At times it may be difficult to hear his voice, but he repeats himself constantly, at a measured pace. It is difficult for him to remember such fleeting things as words, as his mind is more suited to recalling vast ages of nature in a single sweep.

It would be a mistake to call Jack's character a personality, since he is not a person in the ordinary sense. He is ponderous, deliberate, and his views and decisions are not easily changed. He is generally unmoved by statements that might invoke rage or pity in a human being, having never fully developed emotion beyond vague satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and his own words are matter-of-fact and unconcernedly harsh at times. He is selfish, but not egotistical - everything he does is done to fulfill his own wishes, which generally include the wellbeing of benevolent persons around him.

Things that die in Jack's presence do so very slowly indeed - his presence incites all natural things to flourish and grow exponentially, and death itself feels its power weakening when Jack-in-the-Green is nearby. Similarly, he himself is very difficult to kill while there are things around him that yet live, as he draws his power from them as much as they do the reverse. When all the world's life ultimately perishes in fire or water, Jack-in-the-Green will be the last to go, save the immortal Gods themselves.

When he touches a plant, Jack can bind it to his will and make it grow as he pleases. He does this mostly to amuse himself, forming startling half-faces out of tree trunks and crafting branches to create secret bowers or artful patterns. Those who come across such works in nature tend to marvel at what they perceive to be the power of blind coincidence, or presume that such works were created for mankind by a benevolent artificer, but the truth of the matter is that Jack-in-the-Green works for his own entertainment above all else.

In addition, Jack can perform acts of stunning growth upon himself, transforming in an instant into an unrecognizable mass of foliage, or a curious moss-grown stump. He can make himself as solid as hardwood, or as insubstantial as a pile of leaves, and he can enter a plant and merge with its dull mind to lend it his own sapience and power of locomotion. He prefers not to do this, however - the crushing weight of the plant's monumentally slow thoughts on his own consciousness could in time cause him to regress back to a vegetative state himself.

Jack rides upon a very large specimen of planta Tartarica barometz, or Vegetable Lamb. Ordinarily these extraordinary creatures are rooted to the ground and can only move a short distance away, but when Jack grasps these roots, they continue to flourish as though deep in rich soil. He uses them as reins to steer his mount, which he has named Myrtle.