The 10-Year Rewind – Part 22 – I See Small People

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 22 is this one — I See Small People — from August 2008, in which I reveal our little gnome collection. Oh, OK then, our big gnome collection ...

As well as collecting eminently transportable, and collectable, succulents while out on the road on holidays, my wife, Pam, and I have acquired another garden collection that's altogether more disreputable. Gnomes. Little people.

We're music lovers, so originally our idea was to put together a band: guitar, bass, drums, fiddle, accordion and maybe flute, sax or whatever else musical and gnomey that came our way. Well, those parameters merely provided a basis to start shopping, and we soon got off the rails on the very first trip. The guiding factors for us were "no boring gnomes" and, with only a few exceptions, "only solid concrete gnomes, please". This is not all of them by any means, but for starters, here's a selection of the little people in our backyard.

If the rules say "only solid concrete gnomes" then it's only right to start off with a plastic one. A plastic shampoo bottle, to be exact, with the shampers still intact. I saw him in a local discount store and all I could see was a great little gnome. He's aged well after six years outside (I keep him out of the sun, of course).

This is how most of the backyard gnomes are placed, hiding amongst greenery somewhere. This guy is the bass player in the band. When young kids come to visit the backyard we just tell them to go find the gnomes, and count them. They like the hidden ones, and of course they all want to take Bart Simpson home.

Hand-painting plain concrete gnomes is a pleasant rainy-day job if there's football on the radio. This guy, who is billed as an anti-terrorist commando gnome, handles security in the backyard. I think he was meant to be a postman gnome, with his cute little satchel, but with some army camouflage gear his postie's bag is now his demo charge unit. When painting them, I do the easy stuff like the clothes, but Pam does the faces.

Almost all the gnomes here are male, as they are in most gardens, but this is Ingrid, one of our more recent acquisitions, who we found, already beautifully painted, in the NSW Blue Mountains last summer. She likes to bake pies, apparently.

Not far from where Ingrid hangs out (under the mint pots), her boyfriend Mitchell, the local librarian, spends all his days reading gardening books in his little garden seat set amidst a field of native Australian violets. 

Unfortunately, even in the most peaceful gardens in the most beautiful cities in the sunniest Antipodean countries, crime continues to claim the innocent. I read once in the English 'Gardens Illustrated' magazine that these corpse gnomes are a specialty of the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, but I bought mine in Melbourne. The kids counting the gnomes usually reel in horror when they find this guy. "Hey mum, there's a dead one over here" or something like that usually announces their macabre little find. 

A very Australian tradition is the footy gnome. Up until recently we didn't have one, but then we came across an unpainted plain concrete fellow and so I gave him the colours of my local Rugby League team, the Balmain Tigers. Following the Tigers used to be a case of long suffering loyalty including back-to-back lost Grand Finals, but then the Tiges went out and surprised everyone by winning the 2005 Premiership, so that should do me for the remainder of my lifetime. I have the DVD.

Earlier on I think I mentioned something about painting gnomes, rainy days and footy. That is a bit of an exaggeration, to be truthful. Here's the gnome painting workshop. It's looked exactly like this for at least the last 12 months. I don't rush gnome painting. Do it in bursts. One day here, and then another day next year. There's hardly any more hiding spots out in the garden for them anyway. And when I finish the clothes, etc, Pam will move in to do the faces (and the rest of the flowers on wheelbarrow boy).

And so with this post completed, I feel like I know what it's like to have 'come out'! I collect gnomes, not a lot of them, but quite a few. Think what you will, I don't care.

We have a fernery!

Here we are in the middle of autumn and the summer has finally passed, although it put up a hell of a fight this year, not wanting to end. We've experienced a very warm April indeed, making autumn a lot shorter, and now we're in May, still getting lots of sunny warm days, but at least the mornings and evenings are nice and chilly. 

And I am pleased to report that our fern garden out the front of the house has become nicely established. All inmates are healthy and happy, and to celebrate the successful completion of Phase One of the fern garden project, this afternoon we introduced two caretaker gnomes to oversee the coming winter. (Hopefully, if you click on the photo it will come up a lot bigger).

Hard to see, are they? Of course they're hard to see, because we've put them well into the centre of the front garden, where there are lots of spider webs to deter cowardly thieves.

Now, I don't want to be too snobby about gnomes, because we love all our gnomes equally in our little Utopian democracy here in Amateur-Land, but not to put too fine a point on it ... these are our two most expendable gnomes. Or if you prefer, our worst gnomes, but I really don't like that kind of ugly language.

The gnome on the right, with the bright red hat, is Stumpy. He suffered a nasty accident in the garden shed a while back, while being repainted. Stumpy fell about three feet off the painting table onto the shed's hard concrete floor, shattering his left hand and his left foot into so many tiny little fragments that there was no hope of gluing anything back on. So I have buried Stumpy deep into the mulch, where his missing limbs can't be seen. Should a thief ever crawl through the spider webs to nick Stumpy, I hope the sight of his ghastly handless & footless condition gives them a fright.

The gnome on the left, Spruiky, is a very humble plastic one, an advertising press release handout from Seasol, with the inscription "Don't Forget the Seasol" plastered on the rock that he's sitting on. He might lack the class of a true concrete gnome, but he seems to like his work and I hope he has a long career as a fern caretaker.

Now, all the fern garden has to do is survive winter, get seriously bigger next spring, and I think I can call our little fern garden project a success. Thank you Pammy for suggesting it in the first place!

Restaurant for flying visitors

Recently, last week in fact, I shared an experience with just 20 million other people on the planet that day. It was my birthday. (Do the maths ... 7.3 billion on Earth, 365 days a year, average of 20 million people have a birthday each day. Don't worry, you're still special!) 

My Pammy is an all-time champion gift buyer, present wrapper, card sender and general rememberer of everyone's birthday, and so this year she found this nice garden gnome bird feeder for me, along with some other lovely thoughtful gifts. All I had to do was add some seed.

It just so happens that I always have a little bag of birdseed on hand, and my best customers for free bird seed are a two very gentle turtle-doves who have just successfully raised a chick over the recent late winter/early spring period. Though I try not to make them dependent on me for seed, whenever the mood takes me to put some out, they're there in a flash.

So it didn't take long for them to discover their new bird feeding guy. (In case you're wondering who the white-streaked green gnome is, he's a plastic money-box gnome who I keep under shelter, just beside my shed door. He's filled with sand so he doesn't blow over, and he does door-stop duty when needed.) The doves patiently take turn to feed. Soon after I took this photo, the one feeding stopped, hopped off, and the other hopped up for some seed.

In case you're wondering "are turtle-doves native to Australia?" my bird reference book says "no". They are native to South-East Asia and southern China, and were introduced to Australia from the 1860s onwards (like a great many Australian residents, come to think of it).

They're the gentlest, most docile birds I know. These two have been an item for a few years now, and I hope that I'm not spoiling them with the occasional extra feeds. They do look a bit porky, though, don't they?

So "thank you" Pammy for the lovely gnome bird-feeder, it's a classy addition to our gnome-friendly, bird-friendly garden.

Conventional behaviour

Well, it's not often that I do any on-the-spot reportage in this quiet little gardening blog, but today's posting comes to you from the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney, where medium-sized crowds gathered to attend the umpteenth annual Australia Day Garden Gnome Convention held every year at pretty little Glenbrook.

The constant light drizzle didn't deter all the dads, mums, prams, free-range children on the hoof, grannies, grandpas and assorted uncles and aunties, including Pammy and me.

Anyway, enough reportage, you get the picture... and besides, you're here to see the gnomes. Here we go, starting off with some of our favourites from the show.

How could I have missed this guy? But I did,
walked straight past this handsome cricketer
gnome, but good old Eagle Eyes Pammy
didn't miss him, nestled in amongst a batch
of non-sporting gnomes.

Wow, what a nice, patient paint job on these harlequins!

Looking like a mirror ball, Disco Gnome
would have looked even better on a sunny day. 

Nothing like a good 'prop" to enhance a gnome. We saw some
gnomes with the usual lawnmowers, guitars and rakes, but
it's hard to beat a speedboat. 

These two had their own working railway, but quite frankly
that is a bit over the top. Speedboat wins!

Believe it or not, there is such a thing as
good and bad taste when it comes to garden
gnomes. This Dame Edna gnome is right on
the dividing line between the two. However ... 

... these disgraceful strumpet gnomes are on the other side
 of that dividing line between good and bad taste. Gnomes
 are a male-dominated profession as it is, and introducing
 female gnomes only if they take their clothes off
says a lot about the state of sexism in Gnomeland. 

However, these minor lapses into bad taste hardly stood out from the crowds of countless little men in their red hats, with cherubic smiles on their faces. 

It's been several years since our last visit to the Glenbrook Gnome convention, and we'll probably be back up here again a few more years from now. Shame about the drizzly weather this time round, but it didn't deter the crowds all that much, and it certainly didn't bother the gnomes one bit!

Noble ones

My Pammy is a woman of many talents, many of which I do not possess. I've told you about her artistic abilities several times here on this blog, but she has so many more talents than just being a fab artist, illustrator and designer. She's always the one at restaurants who bothers to read the whole menu and picks out something really interesting that none of us had even noticed was there. And she's like that in shops, too. She always seems to find something hidden away that others don't spot. And yesterday she brought home her latest find. He doesn't have a name yet, but 'The Chief' is the obvious one for the meantime, isn't it?

The photos can't show you this, but he sparkles
in the sunlight. He isn't a moulded plaster or 
concrete figure, he's carved from something 
heavy, with a silvery, quartzy glint to it.

Handsome face. And he's rough around the
edges, all over. He looks hand-carved. 
Pammy found The Chief at a secondhand store
not far from here, which opened up only last
week. Like any good secondhand place it was 
crammed full of stock, and that's where the
observant browsers, like Pammy, come into their own.  

Pammy knows I am an 'out and proud' 
garden gnome lover with a libertarian 
notion of what constitutes a garden
gnome. Across the way, eyeing off The
Chief with suspicion, is our entombed warrior
 which I bought last year at the Art Gallery 
of NSW. He's about 60cm (two feet) tall, while 
The Chief is about 45cm (18 inches) tall. 
I am sure The Chief is wondering 'who's 
that guy with the cool body armour?'.

I am sure they'll end up getting along famously. Both have much in common, being warriors with a noble bearing. I'm not sure how they view their quiet retirement in a Sydney garden, but that's fate for you. You never know where you're going to end up, do you?