The Garden Gnome

For the second tradition featured on this blog, I am going to have a look at a quintessential English tradition-- the garden gnome. As I'm an anglophile, I expect English traditions will feature quite heavily on Traditions Traditions Traditions!

A garden gnome is generally a statuette of an old man with a white beard, dressed in a cap and wearing colourful clothes, which is placed in a garden. He is often smoking a pipe.

The concept of a gnome, the mythological creature itself, was first introduced by the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus (died 1541). He described a gnome as an earth elemental. In European folklore, gnomes are also seen as tiny beings who guard buried treasure and-- most relevant to garden gnomes-- help on the farm.

Garden gnomes seem to be associated predominantly with England, although they actually originated in Germany. Here, they were called Gartenzwerge (garden dwarfs) and began to be made in the 1870s, in the central German town of Gräfenroda. These garden gnomes were quite a far cry from the diminutive creatures of today, generally being about three foot tall. They were individually crafted and painted, as opposed to the mass-produced gnomes of later years. (Nevertheless, some gnomes are still created in this way-- in fact, the descendants of the original manufacturers in Gräfenroda are still following the family business.)

An appearance at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1898 led to a greater popularity for the statuettes, and it wasn't long before they appeared in England. Here, they are first recorded in the garden of Charles Isham, a Northampton baronet, who brought twenty-one home from Germany. He was also a spiritualist and apparently believed in the existence of actual gnomes. His last surviving gnome, Lampy, is a celebrity among gnomes today, and still lives in Isham's home, Lamport Hall. The story goes that Isham's daughters hated the gnomes and tried to get rid of them all when he died. However, they overlooked Lampy, and he has outlived them.

Charles Isham

It's easy to see why the garden gnome was so popular in England. The English seem to have a particular predilection towards the ungainly-- after all, the bulldog is one of their national symbols, Toby Jugs are much admired, and hobbits seem to have been J.R.R. Tolkien's idealization of his own people. Garden gnomes are whimsical, stolid, and utterly lacking in glamour-- no wonder the English took to them!

The gnomes on the cover of George Harrison's massive-selling All Things Must Pass album are in fact historical garden gnomes, of the larger and hand-crafted variety. The Beatles seemed to delight in insulting each other via songs and album covers, after the band had broken up, and the four garden gnomes sprawled on the grass here have been assumed to represent the Fab Four. According to this theory, the title and the cover image combine to show that George was putting his time in the most famous band in history behind him.

Gnomes did not reach America until after World War Two, and plastic gnomes became popular there in the sixties. There seems to be a general consensus that the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves influenced the popularity and appearance of garden gnomes in America. It was also influenced by a series of books about gnomes by a Dutch writer called Wil Huygen, which showed them as creatures living in harmony with nature.

John Major, the British Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, has a family connection to gnomes. His father, Tom Major, manufactured them. (Tom Major, in his days as a circus performer, has also been suggested as David Bowie's inspiration for the character Major Tom, in his hit "Space Oddity". David Bowie also released the infamous novelty single "The Laughing Gnome". Coincidence, or something more?)

Gnomes were popular with the wealthy at first, but as mass production took over, they became more a feature of working class life. Today there is much debate over whether the garden gnome suffers from social snobbery. The Chelsea Flower Show, the most prestigious gardenf show in Britain, forbids them-- although it insists that the ban is not upon gnomes as such, but upon brightly coloured and mythological creatures. Hmmm. It temporarily lifted the ban in 2013. Her Majesty the Queen surveyed a line of one hundred and fifty gnomes on this occasion.

Ikea, the giant Swedish furniture retailer, do not sell garden gnomes and in 2013 (a big year for gnomes) they released an advertisement showing a family smashing the unfortunate statuettes. Complaints were made that it was frightening to children. Their marketing manager Peter Wright described gnomes as "the ultimate embodiment of everything that's tired and dreary about British gardens." One suspects gnome-phobia is a variant of cultural cringe, that well-documented phenomenon.

In 2016, the Daily Mirror reported that Britain was losing its love for gnomes, as sales had dropped by fifty per cent over ten years. According to the same newspaper, the popularity of the garden gnome had peaked in the 1970s. However, they reported there were still five million in Britain-- compared to 25 to 30 million in Germany.

In the same year, the supermarket Asda polled two thousand British people for their attitudes towards garden ornaments. Ninety-four per cent said they would never have a gnome in their garden. Tough days for British gnomes, it seems.

The reaction against gnomes may be in part due to their debasement in recent decades-- it is not uncommon to see gnomes made to look like characters from movies, or even gnomes performing rude gestures.

Something about gnomes seems to induce hilarity in many. In France, there is a fairly well-known organisation called the Front de Libération des Nains de Jardin, which seeks to "liberate" gnomes away from the garden and into forests. Apparently, it has liberated more than six thousand gnomes since it began operations in 1997. On one occasion, the gnomes it "liberated" were found hanging by their necks from a bridge.

"Gnome-knapping" is a craze which has become quite well-known. It began in Australia in the mid-eighties, and has spread around the world since then. The gnome-knapper kidnaps a garden gnome and sends its owners picture of the gnome in various holiday destinations, or engaging in various activities. The French film Amelie (which I've never seen) involved the titular character gnome-napping her father's garden gnome. Usually the gnome is returned.

In 2008, a French man in the region of Bretagne was arrested for stealing one hundred and seventy garden gnomes. And, in 2002, three young men in Lockport, New York, were arrested for a more modest haul of fourteen.

But let us turn from crime to art. Recent years have shown a race to create the world's biggest gnome. In 2006, a thirteen-and-a-half foot cement gnome was erected in New York. This was superseded by a fifteen foot tall concrete gnome in Iowa, called Elwood. However, the world's biggest gnome is in Poland, in a town called Nowa Sol. It is made of fibreglass and stands seventeen foot.

The world's third largest gnome, in New York

In fact, although gnomes have never been popular in Poland (Poles prefer to put angels in their gardens), it produces a great deal of them. Most garden gnomes today are made either there or in China.

It seems that, while serious sculptors are choosing the garden gnome for a subject, ordinary English home-owners are eschewing them. Let us hope that this most English of traditions does not end up relegated to the garden shed!