GNOME sweet gnome
LOVE THEM OR LOATHE THEM, THESE KITSCH ORNAMENTS CERTAINLY MAKE A STATEMENT!
For years – in fact for decades – gnomes were banned from the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show. Why? Probably because they’re, well, tacky.
Gnome enthusiasts described the ban as “a controversial and flagrant display of discrimination“, and officials were accused of taking a snobbish attitude to the ornaments often derided as working class.
But in 2013, on the 100th anniversary of the show, the Royal Horticultural Society bowed to public pressure and lifted the ban. Gnomes were to be allowed and even celebrated. A parade of 150 of them, decorated for the occasion by celebrities, were lined up for official inspection by the Queen. Yes, really.
Not that gnomes had never appeared at the show – rebels had frequently smuggled them into their displays, possibly inspired by the Travelling Gnome Prank, which saw people taking garden gnomes (their own or someone else’s) on road trips and photographing them in front of famous landmarks.
A gnome called Severson was taken from Washington to Nevada in 2005, and became a national news story when he met Paris Hilton at a gas station and posed with her for a picture that appeared in People magazine. Rumour has it he was later sold on eBay.
And then there was the Garden Gnome Liberation Front, whose apparent mission was to free garden gnomes and return them to the wild. When this involved misappropriating them from their homes, criminal charges sometimes followed. Who would have thought?
Despite a busy and very entertaining history, garden gnomes are a relatively recent invention, originating in Germany in the mid-1800s and becoming valued for their perceived powers to protect the garden. It was believed they were able to walk through soil as easily as we walk on it and that they dwelt underground because if they were caught out in the sun, it would turn them to stone. Which, obviously, it did.
They became hugely popular
in the UK in the 1840s, when landowner and gardener
Sir Charles Isham brought 21 terracotta gnomes back to his home from Germany.
After his death, his daughters destroyed all but one of them, which survives today and is reputedly insured for a million pounds.
The Isham daughters weren’t the only ones to inflict destruction upon gnomes. In 2013, Swedish furniture giant Ikea launched an advertising campaign in the UK to encourage people to replace their garden gnomes with new products from the company. The ad features a couple who kill off their gnomes by smashing them to smithereens with a power hose and slinging them against a garden fence.
The ad closes with the caption: “Make more of your garden. Say no to gnomes.”
Affronted TV viewers, however, said no to Ikea and complained to the Advertising Standards Authority.
Beware the revenge of the little folk!