Why Are Garden Gnomes So Polarizing?
When I moved back into a house for the first time since childhood, I had my priorities straight. Living in a Los Angeles bungalow meant I’d have enough room for a place to eat that wasn’t my couch, but a kitchen table could wait. After years of suppressing my passion in a Brooklyn apartment that could barely fit a plant, let alone a yard, I was finally free: It was gnome time.
My love of gnomes is genetic. Though my mother’s interior decor aesthetic is modern and sparse, brightly colored miniature statues of mythical dwarves somehow made the cut. The inside of her house has always been allergic to kitsch—a classic “new money” attempt to distance oneself from a middle-class upbringing. But outside, among the honeysuckles and roses, I was able to escape to a vibrant fantasy land led primarily by tiny German earth-dwelling friends.
Though they can be traced all the way back to Ancient Rome, what we now consider a garden gnome started becoming a thing during the Renaissance, when hunchback “grotesques” were placed in rich people’s gardens to bring them good luck. In the 18th and 19th centuries, their popularity as talismans spread across Europe. They were encouraged by production in Dresden, Germany, by Baehr and Maresch in the 1840s and later by Sir Frank Crisp, who owned one of the largest collections in Britain and opened his estate weekly for viewing during the 1910s.
With the release of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the 1930s and the growth of the suburbs in the United Kingdom, the ubiquity of gnomes in working-class yards meant their once posh status vanished. (Fun fact: The main British manufacturer at the time was Tom Major-Ball, the father of working-class prime minister John Major.) Then, in the 1970s and beyond—with mass production and specialty variations in full swing—they began to take on a humorous and even tacky element, with gnome pranks becoming more and more common. For example, the Gnome Liberation Front justifies stealing garden gnomes and taking them on trips by claiming they are “enslaved in gardens across the world… For too long we have let our neighbors usurp the rights of these gentle woodland creatures.”
As wealth signifiers, their journey from each end of the spectrum is part of what makes garden gnomes so intriguing—and why they seem to inspire an almost visceral reaction in people. In 2013, the prestigious Chelsea Garden Show temporarily lifted their 100-year ban on them to mixed reviews. The Royal Horticultural Society claims that the now reinstated ban is about not distracting from the flowers, but many think it’s because of their low-class association. Research even shows they are so off-putting to some buyers that they can even decrease your property’s value.
When I began the search for my very own gnome, I was entirely unconcerned by what the humanoid creature might project about my taste to the neighborhood. The girls that get it, get it, and the girls that don’t, don’t. But I did wonder if perhaps the pendulum wasn’t swinging the other way yet again, as I coveted these pricey gnome table-stools by Philippe Starck, which are favorites of design nerds despite being a slight departure from Kartell’s usual simplistic schtick.
