‘Safe’ haven for garden guardians

HAVING had a couple of weeks off, I haven’t really touched a plant or picked up a trowel for a while. I have, however, overdosed on culture: The British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A and a host of other cultural hotspots, while also staying in a swanky Islington town house and eating lobster.

It’s a hard life! Said townhouse though had a rather unexpected mantelpiece decoration – a jolly garden gnome – which got me to thinking about these rather odd garden additions and their reputation as the last word in kitsch.

I do remember a gnome in the front garden of my grandparents’ house, mostly because I was warned off from ever picking it up or playing with it by my grandfather, and bribed to do exactly the opposite by my grandmother, who hated the thing and would have liked nothing better than to see it ‘accidentally’ broken.

Which sort of sums up gnomes in the garden perfectly. Like Marmite they divide the nation. They are banned from the Chelsea Flower Show, which for some people is the ultimate proof that the RHS is a snob and not representative of most gardeners.

Yet others can become obsessive about them, filling their gardens with not just the traditional jolly figures, fishing, gardening or just slouching around but with modern, edgier and contemporary characters. According to one online shop, for example, its Trump gnome is guaranteed to make your garden great again!

Despite their twee reputation gnomes have a rather august history, which can be traced back to the Romans and Vikings. They are a combination of the mythological ‘earth dwellers’ of Norse folklore tradition and the Roman idea of garden helpers. This idea began with Hadrian dotting his own garden with real human hermits and briefly became fashionable in the 1800s here in this country with wealthy landowners hiring ornamental hermits for their estates.

Fortunately employing a human has been replaced with adding a ceramic gnome or two, to fulfil the same decorative and protective purpose.

For whatever reason, in fairy stories and mythology, gnomes have historically been small, rarely more than a foot in height, although usually smaller. Perhaps this is a consequence of their unique distinguishing characteristic – they were thought to be able to move though the earth beneath us as easily as we move through air.

In fact the word gnome itself comes from the Latin ‘gnomus’, sometimes thought to be from the Greek for ‘knowledge’ but more likely from the Greek word for ‘earth-dweller.’

Traditionally, too, they have been stout fellows, mostly male. Part of the ‘gnome’ myth is their inability to survive in sunlight, being creatures of the underground, and it was said they would be turned into stone if they came out into daylight. Whatever their appearance, gnomes have considerable powers, apparently.

Often they guard secret underground treasure (the conical red cap is the traditional headwear of German miners) and have magical powers that can both protect and reward good

Gnomes have a rich history in folklore people as well as punish the unworthy. They also have a close association with the natural world and the secret processes of life, hence they have ended up hanging out in gardens, a belief that places their existence firmly at the heart of the philosophies of mystics like Rudolph Steiner.

They even appear as mischievous garden dwellers in that most modern of fairy stories, Harry Potter.

All of which gives gnomes a little more status and importance than perhaps you would have thought and may be why their first appearance in this country was in a great country estate.

In the nineteenth century a German sculptor and potter from Thuringia, Philip Griebel, had started making ceramic gnomes specifically for the garden, inspired by the myths of his German childhood, and the pointy hatted chaps became an overnight success, quickly spreading around Germany and then the rest of Europe. When Sir Charles Isham, a baronet from Northampton, brought back 21 of these German ceramic figures to decorate his rockery, the cult of the gnome was born in England.

Not that his daughters entirely approved since apparently they removed them as soon as they could. Fortunately they missed one and ‘Lampy’, the oldest garden gnome in the world, is still on display at the estate, insured for around £1 million!

These early gnomes were not quite as rotund and jolly as their modern counterparts and mostly had a certain gravitas and seriousness. They certainly bore little resemblance to modern gnomes, which are now produced firmly with tongue in cheek. Modern gnomes are often slightly rude, or topical, parodies of real life characters or representatives of the ironies of modern life. In recent years there has been a trend, a sort of practical joke with a serious message, about the working conditions of gnomes, trapped as they are in gardens, forced to push a wheelbarrow endlessly, fish for their supper or just lean on a spade.

Gnome liberation movements have sprung up all over Europe which ‘liberate’ gnomes from their enforced slavery and release them back into the wild. It started as a way of publicising the plight of people trapped in modern slavery but seems to have taken on a life of its own.

On a lighter front ‘gnoming’ involves removing a gnome from someone’s garden and taking it travelling. Often postcards or pictures of said gnome visiting destinations around the world are sent to the original owner before eventually the gnome returns home, hopefully none the worse for its trip.

Happy gardening.