Gnome Welcome Sign Stake

Five gnomes, one toadstool, and a word.

There is a moment at the end of an evening when people come up the walk and don't quite know they're being greeted. A sign at the turn of the drive does that work quietly. This one has five gnomes standing shoulder to shoulder along a rail, hats up like steeples, flowers and butterflies cut clean through the steel, and a fat spotted toadstool in the middle of them.

Then the word, in a good round script: Welcome. Not shouted. Just said.

Gnomes have been doing this longer than most people realize. They were made in Gräfenroda, in the German state of Thuringia, from about the 1840s — fired terracotta, painted by hand, meant to be set out among the vegetables. In 1847 an English baronet named Sir Charles Isham brought twenty-one of them home to Lamport Hall and put them out on his rockery. One of the twenty-one is still there. They call him Lampy, and he is thought to be the oldest garden gnome in the world.

There is a bit of snobbery in the story too. The Chelsea Flower Show would not permit gnomes on the grounds for the better part of a century. They finally relented in 2013, for the show's hundredth year, and the gnomes came in.

We think that says something about who they belong to. Not the judges. The people out watering in the evening.

Set this one where it will be read on the way in — the trunk of the tree by the drive, a fence post at the gate, the wall beside the front door.

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