House Gardener of Highgarden

Legend places the house's origin in Garth Gardener, eldest son of Garth Greenhand, who is said to have arrived wearing a crown of vines and flowers and made the land bear fruit wherever he walked. Highgarden rose from that, and from the Oaken Throne he ruled with his brothers' blessing, who named him lord of it all.

The earliest solid trace of that reign goes back two thousand years, when the Gardeners armed the people of the Shield Islands to hold off the ironborn raiders. In time they absorbed House Hightower's domains too, which stopped paying them tribute in exchange for joining the fight against those same raiders.

When the Andals landed, the Gardeners didn't meet them the way other kings did — they handed out land and titles, took Andal knights into their own guard, and more than one king married a daughter of the most powerful war-chiefs. Marriage by marriage, the Andal warlords with any real chance of threatening Highgarden simply stopped existing.

The children of the forest paid the price for that peace: by allying with the very people who hunted them down wherever they were found, the Gardeners broke whatever pact had bound them, and it's thought that's when the children left the Reach for good.

Garth VII, called Goldenhand, brought the house to its highest point. As a young man he crushed a Dornish army ten thousand strong, and later held off a combined attack from the kings of the Rock and the Storm.

But what people remembered wasn't the fighting — it was the sixty years of peace that followed: an entire generation born, raised, and buried without ever knowing what it meant to fight for their king. He reigned for eighty years and died at ninety-two.

Garth X, known as Greybeard, left no sons, and his two sons-in-law — the lords of House Peake and House Manderly — went to war with each other to put their own wives on the throne. The Lannisters and the Durrandons used the chaos to bite off large stretches of the Reach, while Dornish raids on the Marches grew more frequent.

A Dornish king sacked Oldtown; another rode into Highgarden itself, burned the Oaken Throne, and left old Garth X — by then lost to madness — to fend for himself as the realm collapsed around him.

Twenty years after Garth X's fall, a second cousin of his defeated the Peakes and the Manderlys with help from House Tyrell and other loyal lords, and was crowned Mern VI. He rebuilt Highgarden, won back much of the lost territory, and his sons made the Dornish pay in full for every raid the Reach had suffered.

The fighting with their neighbors never really stopped: Gyles III marched his army against the King of the Storm, and while he was away the King of the Rock struck at the Reach. That spark grew into a bigger war, drawing in two river kings and three Dornish kings, and it ended with Gyles III dead and the borders more or less back where they'd started.

Roughly a thousand years ago, the Gardeners themselves drove House Manderly out of the Reach, and the Manderlys resettled by the White Knife, up in the North. As for King Garse VII, all that's remembered of him is how he died — killed by Argilac Durrandon, the Storm King, at the Battle of Summerfield.

When the Targaryens landed in Westeros, Mern IX joined forces with King Loren Lannister of the Rock, and between them they raised fifty-five thousand men — the largest army the continent had ever seen. They met Aegon and his dragons at the Field of Fire.

The Targaryen troops gave ground, but dragonfire cost the Lannister-Gardener host four thousand lives, Mern IX among them, along with his sons, grandsons, brothers, and nephews. One nephew survived the battle with terrible burns but died two days later, and with him the Gardener line ran out of men to inherit it.

Harlen Tyrell, steward of the house, surrendered Highgarden to Aegon I without a fight, and was rewarded with his former lords' lands and titles: Lord Paramount of the Reach and Lord of Highgarden. A new house began where this one had ruled.

Plenty of the houses that fill the Reach today — Florent, Rowan, Oakheart, and others — still trace themselves back to Garth Greenhand, and it's no accident: that shared ancestry gets used, even now, to argue the Tyrells have a weaker claim to rule, since their own line runs back to the Gardeners only through women.