Editorial

Jo McCarroll discusses the worrying worldwide shortage of garden gnomes.

T“I’m a believer that there’s artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There’s art in absolutely everything.” – Darren Criss

he first rumours I heard about the garden gnome shortage came out of the UK. Initially horticultural trade press, and later the mainstream media, started reporting that supply chain issues, including a shortage of the raw material required to make gnomes and distribution challenges following the blockage of the Suez Canal, had led to a dearth of gnome stock. Soon garden centre staff added their voices to the Greek chorus: reporting there had been a post-pandemic gnome boom, with an upswing in sales of gnomes to a new and different clientele meaning gnomes were sold out across the land. That was backed up by research by Sainsbury’s Bank, which found – and this is a little gnome fact – last year, gnome sales in the UK increased by 20 per cent.

And all this meant gnomes of any type – whether plastic, concrete or stone; whether fishing, smoking a pipe, napping or doing all three at once – were in extremely short (gnome pun intended) supply in the UK.

Garden retailers were reportedly looking far and wide to find more gnomes: contacting suppliers across Europe and China, searching wheresoever a gnome may roam. But the diminutive lawn ornaments were simply gnome-where to be found.

“We haven’t seen a gnome in six months now, unfortunately,” a staff member at Highfield Garden World in Gloucestershire told British newspaper The Guardian.

Alarmed by this international gnome crisis, I got in touch with Gary Pearson who, with wife Maria, owns Levin’s Yard Art Lower North Island which has been manufacturing concrete garden ornaments for nearly 20 years. To my consternation the opening page of his website (I assume in the garden ornament business you would call it the gnome page) spelled out a stark warning. “Unfortunately,” it read, “due to the unprecedented demand for our products stock levels are not where they should be.”

But when I managed to reach Gary, he reassured me that it was not that there were no gnomes, as the company manufactures the stock it sells. The gnomes, and indeed all the other garden ornaments and outdoor decorative features they offer, were simply selling faster than he and the team could manufacture them. There had been a rush of demand for all sorts of garden ornaments after the country came out of the Covid lockdown last year, and by the time they had caught up on all those orders it was straight into the Christmas rush (“everyone wants a gnome at Christmas,” he told me). “So we are not having shortages, we are just having trouble keeping up with making stuff. We are busy as, just trying to catch up on our orders! But we’re making progress.”

When they started the garden ornament business, Gary said he “vowed and declared” he was not going to make garden gnomes. “But at the end of the day people wanted them!” Gnomes were becoming a bit more popular in general, he told me, and people were looking for the wellmade quality concrete gnomes that Yard Art produces. “You can get some really nice garden gnomes from the Warehouse and the box stores, but they are polyresin or plastic, so they will fade and break”. He and his team make 73 different styles of gnome, he said. “Fishing gnomes are always popular – we have three or four of those. And we have a range we call naughty gnomes. There is one with his finger up, he’s always popular, and some have their privates hanging out. They always sell well, especially at Christmas.”

So worry not, my precious chums. You may hear about gnome shortages overseas. But here in Aotearoa, there is no crisis for first gnome buyers. In fact you could say the gnome news is good news.