Wild times and world tours: On the trail of the garden gnome

What are they up to with their scuffed, unbuttoned boots, florid faces and tightly cinched belts, poaching unwary goldfish out of the pond? 

Where there are a few grinning gartenzwerg loitering, they are often in the company of shifty cement raccoons, hysteric resin squirrels and dodgy, elastic-limbed solar lit imps clambering up trellising and ascending to second-storey windows. It’s time as a seasoned, troll-startled reporter to investigate the super-natural population living it up in many of our gardens.

Now, of course, I’m not implicating real fairies in any of these wild horticultural romps. 

Fairies are lovely, delightful and don’t wear Garda mug-shots for faces. 

If you want to create a fairy garden to protect them from the devious, dipsomaniac, rampaging gnomes, I have a nice safe feature for that: irishexaminer.com/property/homeandoutdoors/arid-31002944.html. If there are any smug-pussed gnomes edited in there — I was coerced with painful wallops around the ankles with small zinc belted buckets by the little fellas.

I refuse to believe our magical, mystical leprechauns are of the same tribe — it’s not possible. Gnomes leer. Irish leprechauns have charming sunshiny smiles. It’s worth noting that gnomes are banned from many garden shows, including Chelsea. 

Still, gnome knowledge has tunnelled its way through a wide swathe of European folklore from the Low Countries to Scandinavia, across mountain ranges and deep raging seas. 

Creepy little wizards — I see you.

Despite all the available written and illustrated records stretching back centuries, the British like to claim the garden gnome as very much their own. 

In 1847 or so, Charles Isham (1819-1903) of Lamport, Northampton, brought a couple of dozen ghastly terracotta gnomes back from his travels to Nuremberg to populate his woodland garden. 

This sort of feigned woolly landscape with dramatic rockeries, ferns and even shell impressed decoration was popular with the Victorians — crackers about the ancient, mystical and fantastic.

An occult European trend linked to gnomes by academics saw brief popularity in the British Isles in the 1800s. An upper-class family would hire in a garden hermit (yes, a human being) to live in a rustic hovel in their parkland. They were expected to dwell 24/7 in a decrepit, mossy hermitage. 

This weird, rather cruel practice has roots in classical civilisation. It dove-tailed nicely with a Grand Tour to bring in a theatrical wise man to thumb beads and mumble on a stump outside a purpose-built grotto, materialising out of the rhododendrons to thrill visitors.

Representative ornaments of earthy garden dwarves or Gobi (taken from gēnomos, the old Latin for earth-dweller) were commonplace in German and Italian gardens from the 17th century, feted with protective powers for the land and householder. Subterranean, they were believed to accrue and guard considerable treasures. 

Thieves then — yes? Stone was a good choice for the statuary as there was some storytelling around gnomes being caught out at dawn and turned to stone by sunshine.

There is only one surviving gnome from the original, invading Isham set — Lampy, or the Lamport Gnome — an iconic figure for gnomes lovers worldwide. Sir Charles’ three daughters murdered the others — it's not just me then. Charles’ estates were on his death entailed away from his vulnerable daughters to his cousin. 

You see where I’m going with this — unmistakable gnomish mischief.

Twentieth-century gnomes and gnomides (female gnomes as described in a 17th-century French guide) with their strange energies and abilities, had it good. They put in their miniature bill-hooks and settled into a particular, English country twee, throwing lines into ornamental ponds, watering the perennials with tiny tin cans, and replicating into various woodland spirits encouraged by Walt Disney’s sugary 1937  Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs.

JR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1914–1973) gave diminutive warrior dwarves a fierce-some, heroic new role while recasting the gnomes as a tall, terrifying mining race. 

JK Rowling, the queen of the derivation of every mythic fantasy figure, sharpened their teeth in her Harry Potter series. Video gaming uses tall hatted, frolicking gnomes extensively as they can be dialled up or down through the horror genre — as sweet or vicious a race, as the software engineer fancies.

Throughout, the gnome retained an acceptable other-worldly status. Mid-century garden centres cast mythical cement buddies for every budget and border. Moulded plastic gnomes were able to represent every wart and facial weft, with horrific, rosy-cheeked accuracy. 

Even to form the word — gnome. To steal from Les Dawson, it takes the expression of a bulldog chewing a wasp. 

They do have their adoring fans and complete obsessives. 

There are several liberation squads returning garden gnomes to the wild including the French Front de Liberation des Nains de Jardins. Yes, really. 

Sometimes gnomes return to their original garden homes — complete with souvenirs from their world tours.

Now, I know what you worldly, toast-snatching, Saturday morning wags are thinking: a gnome is a leprechaun — the term is interchangeable. I’m sorry, but I simply will never accept that. Leprechauns are clearly an Irish ethnic group of benign nature spirits. Ask any American.

They are wonderful, make their own gold by some charming alchemy — and, are perfectly harmless. If you wander around disparaging their kind — leprechauns will phone a fairy to come and take your children away to an underground lair. Maybe forever. Seems fair.