![]() This idea caught on again in 18th-century England, when wealthy landowners would hire a person to be an ‘ornamental hermit’ in their garden. “The undeniable allure of having quiet helpers in the garden has a long history, dating back to the second century AD, when the Roman emperor Hadrian had hermits living throughout his villa. The brightly-colored, grinning creatures of today were likely influenced by the 1937 Disney feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” But the gnomes of this period were not quite the statues we know from our grandmother’s gardens. ![]() By the turn of the 20th century, gnomes were being produced for the masses, mostly by German factories. Once hermitages and their hermits began to fall out of favor, Sir Charles came along with his ceramic garden elfins, which offered a cheaper and more humane concept for garden decor. Some historians believe that this garden hermit fad paved the road for gnome love in Britain, including Gordon Campbell, who wrote a book about this bizarre landscaping trend called The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Garden Gnome in 2013. These recluses provided the appropriate melancholic ambiance that was fashionable in Georgian England. Contracts spelled out the do’s and don’ts of the job, which included living in a rustic, unheated outbuilding (or hermitage) not speaking to anyone not washing wearing disheveled tunics and letting the body go unkept-as in growing long fingernails, toenails and beards. This idea caught on again in 18th-century England, when wealthy landowners would hire a person to be an “ornamental hermit” in their garden. Associated with landscapes of the tasteless, tacky, and unsophisticated, the Royal Horticulture Society of Britain banished these “brightly colored creatures” from the Chelsea Flower Show in 2006, and has continued to do so every year, except in 2013-the 100th anniversary of the spectacle.īut the undeniable allure of having quiet helpers in the garden has a long history, dating back to the second century AD, when the Roman emperor Hadrian had hermits living throughout his villa’s garden. Sir Charles’s daughters aren’t the only arbiters of taste who have deemed garden gnomes unsightly. When “Lampy”-as this historic garden gnome is now known-was found, he was crowned the oldest known garden gnome in the world. Even within the Isham family, some thought the gnomes were unfit for the aesthetic of a palatial estate, and Sir Charles’s daughters cleared the garden of all but one, which remained hidden from sight until decades later. Much like today, these garden do-gooders elicited strong feelings on either side of the spectrum in 19th-century England. As early as the 1600s, garden statuary in Europe had evolved to include a key figure known as gobbi, Italian for “dwarf” or “hunchback.” In 19th-century Germany, these diminutive men with pointed hats, rotund bellies, and white beards became known as Gartenzwerge (garden dwarfs.) Sir Charles had found the statues in Nuremberg, Germany– a country steeped in the folklore of gnomes, trolls, fairies and other forest folk, where they are known to be cheery, if not slightly mischievous, creatures who offered late night assistance in gardens and the protection of property. When Sir Charles Isham brought 21 terra cotta garden gnomes to England to decorate his 90-foot rockery in 1847, he created a sensation in the United Kingdom for bearded garden helpers.
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