This year, the Royal Horticultural Society has lifted its ban on garden gnomes at the Chelsea Flower Show. The ban has been in place throughout the history of the annual event and has been lifted only once before, in the centenary year of 2013. This year, it’s being waived to accommodate an auction of gnomes painted by celebrities, which will raise money for the RHS’s efforts to promote gardening in schools.
One hopes that the ban will be clamped firmly back in place in 2027. Not out of snobbery, or out of any anti-gnome animus. The ban has two marvellous qualities. First, it is very English, in its strait-laced and futile efforts to control a very English kind of naffness; both sides of the equation, the silly ban and its silly object, come out of the same national spirit, and that’s a kind of symmetry to be cherished.
The second marvellous quality is that the ban implicitly treats gnomes as powerful and disruptive. Quite right. Through the garden gnome pulse elemental forces that must be kept sternly in check. They are revenants of cultures older than Christianity, dipping their fishing rods in the collective unconscious. According to Geoff Nicholson’s book The Suburbanist (2021), the word gnome was coined by the 16th-century Swiss natural philosopher Paracelsus and was introduced to English by Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock (1712–17); they were part of a pseudo-zoology that included nymphs, sylphs and salamanders. But their origin is in the folklore of northern Europe. ‘Garden gnomes were, and are, phallic symbols, counterparts of Tom Thumb and Rumpelstiltskin,’ writes Paul Oliver in Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and its Enemies (1981), co-authored with Ian Davis and Ian Bentley. Oliver continues:
There are no female garden gnomes; a manufacturer who produced a large number of dwarf women is said to have been left with hundreds unsold. The small pool around which the gnomes sit or recline, and in which they fish in so many gnome gardens, is a vaginal symbol. Together they express territoriality […] Though their laughing, jovial expressions may seem to invite the visitor, they inhabit the garden in a manner that inhibits any invasion. […] laughter can be an aggressive act.
In fact, a gnome appears on the front cover of my 1994 Pimlico edition of this enthralling book. It is clearly the avatar of the whole subject of suburbia. This includes the hatred that they attract. Suburbia is ever a contest between the licence afforded by private property and the bristling propriety that crystallises at the edges of one’s plot; between possibility and repression.
These themes run through Small Prophets, Mackenzie Crook’s new sitcom for the BBC. Michael Sleep, affably portrayed by Pearce Quigley, is a loner living in a semi at the end of a cul-de-sac. The series was filmed in Greater Manchester but could be anywhere in England. His home is sinking into its overgrown garden, partly because it is not in fact his home, but belonged to his partner, who disappeared seven years ago. He works at a DIY superstore, a job he treats with a magnificent lack of care that his boss, Gordon (played by Crook), is ill-equipped to comprehend, let alone discipline. Sleep is a sad, gentle renegade and his melancholy idyll is threatened on all sides by the forces of conformity and materialism. All the other front gardens have been paved over.
The otherworldly intrudes into this familiar terrain. Sleep’s father (Michael Palin) is in a nursing home, his memory retreating – and, as is often the case with memory, that has left parts of his well-travelled past freshly uncovered and bright. He recalls a way of cultivating homunculi, ‘prophets’, in jars of rainwater, which can answer questions and about the future and will always tell the truth; this, he thinks, will help Sleep resolve the mystery of his partner. More to indulge his dad than anything else, Sleep gives it a try, and the results are unexpected.
Where Small Prophets excels is in the way it makes the thoroughly fantastical feel natural – not so much an intrusion, as I said above, but something emerging from a deeper stratum of memory and meaning. Detectorists, Crook’s previous sitcom, worked the same enchantment, giving us a tender comedy of provincial character that occasionally revealed it was unfolding atop a dazzling reservoir of millennia of history. As Agnès Varda said, ‘If we opened people, we’d find landscapes.’
The landscapes in Small Prophets are more superficially humdrum than those in Detectorists: the cul-de-sac, the out-of-town retail park, the canal path. They are also more highly policed. As Ian Bentley wrote in Dunroamin:
The Cul-de-sac’s enclave quality enabled residents to exercise surveillance over the activities taking place there; and encouraged the more respectable tenants to control undesirable activities, much as the sharing of sanitary facilities in the Peabody blocks had done half a century before.
We might take this as a slightly dated reading on suburbia, something out of Thelwell cartoons of the 1950s and ’60s – whither today the disagreeable, balding, pipe-smoking man pretending to trim his privet while frowning at suspected deviancy? Crook shows this figure is still with us, albeit completely transformed, in the brilliant character of Clive, Sleep’s neighbour, an up-and-coming young man more protein powder than flesh, whose house is a bleached greige nightmare. Jon Pointing’s wonderful performance as Clive is reason enough to watch the show – a 21st-century Hyacinth Bucket.
But magic still feels ready to break through everywhere, the way an oil stain takes on the character of an ancient trickster spirit, and the way an untended garden goes wild. It’s embedded in the original features of Sleep’s unimproved house – the leaded windows and half-timber touches in the garage, the stained glass in the front door. Osbert Lancaster, with considerable scorn, called this style ‘By-Pass Variegated’ – an ‘infernal amalgam’ of historical references ignorantly combined by profit-hungry speculative builders. In Dunroamin, Oliver, Davis and Bentley recast this unloved semi-detached style as a bubbling cauldron of repressed desires, such as the flowers in the off-the-shelf stained-glass door: ‘Swelling on the stems, breaking out in tumescent designs at the flowerhead, or thrust centrally into spreading curves, they were symbols of sexual union and of new life.’
Similarly, the homunculi must be incubated in manure, from which they draw life. The show implies that decay is a more potent and creative force than meticulous preservation. It’s all a bit libidinal, if unspoken, a tension personified in Clive’s wife, Bev (Sophie Willan), who finds the goings-on next door as intriguing as her husband finds them exasperating. The prophets, twitching spectres of semi-transparent white protoplasm floating in liquid, speak only the truth, and the truth can be disruptive and even dangerous, particularly in a cul-de-sac. Just like the laughter of the gnomes.
Small Prophets is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
