The return of the garden gnomes

BarcelonaGarden gnomes have returned to the Chelsea Flower Show, the great international temple of landscaping that has been held annually in London since 1913. This week, a collection of gnomes painted by a select group of celebrities, with the complicity of King Charles III, who plays a very active role in this prestigious floral festival, has been auctioned for charitable purposes. It had been almost a hundred years since gnomes were expelled from the competition. In 1927, the organization considered them incompatible with the distinction of the show. They were a tacky trinket that did not deserve to be part of the floral paradise associated with the British aristocracy. Footballer David Beckham, horticulturist Frances Tophill, and former BBC presenter Alan Tichmarsh have designed the garden with the monarch to reconcile with the little ceramic visitors.

The figure of garden gnomes comes from Central European folklore, and is linked to legends of the underground world. The first decorative specimens began to be made in the 19th century in the German town of Gräfenroda, one of the country's centers for ornamental ceramics, thanks to the pioneering craftsman Philipp Griebel. The aristocrat Sir Charles Isham, a convinced spiritualist, introduced them to the United Kingdom in 1847, when he imported a collection to his estate in Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire. He believed that these gnomes had a real connection with the earth spirits and would act as guardians of the estate. His daughters, on the other hand, hated them profoundly and destroyed a large part of the gnome family. The genocide was not entirely accurate. Decades later, one specimen was found hidden among the bushes. The survivor, nicknamed Lampy, is now insured for one million pounds and is considered the oldest garden gnome in the United Kingdom. The industrial production of these plump, pointy-hatted characters that progressively invaded the humbler neighborhoods led to their spread across Europe, but also led to their vulgarization. The British elites rejected them.

The kitsch saved them. From the seventies onwards, the gnome reappeared ironically thanks to pop culture. The book Gnomes, with illustrations by the artist Rien Poortvliet, catapulted them once again into the contemporary imagination. In the nineties, the Gnome Liberation Front appeared in France, a group that liberated gnomes from private gardens and abandoned them in forests, organizing symbolic funerals and manifestos against their domestication. The phenomenon spread to Germany and Switzerland, where thefts proliferated to such an extent that the International Association for the Protection of Garden Gnomes was founded to combat kidnappings and make them a criminal offense. From this initiative to free gnomes also emerged the practice of the traveling gnome. Terracotta figures stolen and photographed in front of historical monuments. The film Amélie consolidated it as a trend. In the United States, the strict Homeowners Associations, where owners regulate the aesthetics of their residential developments, wanted to ban them, which led to neighborhood disputes. Some even ended up in court. Garden gnomes became small symbols of insurrection in residential areas.

The return of the gnomes to Chelsea has coincided, paradoxically, with one of the most heated controversies of the event: the possibility of using AI to automatically generate garden designs. A proposal that landscape architects have rejected because it goes against the philosophy of sustainability and the craftsmanship of horticulture. In this duality, the two ways of living in this world can be interpreted: from faith in technological efficiency or from nostalgia.