The Secret Life of Lawn Ornaments

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If you take a walk or a bus ride or a drive these days, it's hard to miss the signs.

I mean, literal signs.

It doesn't matter if you're in the city or the suburbs or the country.

People have signs in their windows, in their yards, telling you in no uncertain terms what they like, what they hate, what they believe.

But sometimes as you're passing someone's house, you see a more ambiguous communication, a message that they maybe couldn't put into words or wouldn't want to anyway.

Sometimes you pass a lawn ornament.

Some people, they want to look outside and enjoy

the waterfall, or they want to enjoy, we'll say, an angel.

I think every statue that we sell has a reason for people.

This is Tatiana Ziegler.

She's been a landscape designer for the past 25 years and she's the proprietor of Ziegler's Statuary, a store in North Jersey that sells concrete lawn ornaments of all shapes and sizes.

There's trends, like during COVID, we couldn't keep a Buddha in if we tried.

Really, everything from the smallest to the large is sold out immediately.

This year it's been bears.

It's just bears.

People come in and you ask them, like, what are you looking for?

And they're like, well, I don't know.

And it's like, it really has to speak to you.

This is Tatiana's daughter, Ariana, who works at the shop too.

And then they see something, they're like, oh my, this is amazing.

And then they get that.

And then you leave with something so like random, like the aliens, you know?

There's aliens?

Oh, there's the alien.

Oh, my God, I haven't seen the alien.

People buy that alien?

Yeah.

The alien, a classic little green man in gray concrete, is sprawled on the ground, resting on its elbow, making a peace sign with its other hand.

They also sell swans, Virgin Marys, dolphins, mermaids, lions, mushrooms, fountains, little boys peeing into fountains, even Bigfoot.

Anything that's odd looking is a better seller.

Really?

Yeah, odd.

Are the peeing boy statues popular?

So people love it, but they usually go in the backyard.

They don't go in the front yard.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

They don't sell anything plastic, though, so no pink flamingos here, but they do have a lot of gargoyles.

If they don't buy it because they love it, they buy it because they want to like, I guess, torture their neighbors with it.

Because, I mean, even one lady, she's like, this lady thinks her property line is here.

I'm putting this gargoyle here it's staring right at her house Ariana personally loves this one big pig butler a concrete pig standing on its hind legs wearing a chef's hat holding out a platter you put it by the gorilla it can actually hold like napkins or condiments

but Ariana and Tatiana both know that not every lawn ornament is for everyone So just like clothing, right?

It has to fit you.

It has to go with you.

It has to be your personality.

It's the same thing with the statue.

The pieces do mean something to people.

But what exactly they mean?

Well, that's what we're about to find out.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Lawn ornaments are everywhere, but for something so ubiquitous, they're also mysterious.

What's the person with the flamingo or the gargoyle in their yard trying to say?

Why do they want to say it so publicly?

In today's episode, we're going to take a hard look at three specific lawn ornaments: the garden variety and the not-so-common, the adorable and the odious, the plastic and concrete, and the flesh and blood, those that are still with us, and some that are long gone, and all that speak volumes without saying a word.

So, today on decodering,

what are the lawn ornaments trying to tell us?

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When I started thinking about lawn ornaments, there was one that popped into my mind first.

They're called the gnomes.

What?

You've never seen a gnome?

Well, they're all around us.

Just take a closer look.

That's from the 1980s animated series David the Gnome.

And those bright, plastic, chubby little sprites with pointy hats and rosy cheeks placed in a garden's nooks and crannies are what I picture when I hear the phrase lawn ornament.

And so I reached out to the very aptly named garden historian Twigs Way, who's fascinated with gardens because of what they reveal about the gardener.

It's a bit like looking in their underwear drawer, you know?

Are they uptight?

Are they they kind of casual?

Are they loose?

You know, what's their attitude towards the world in general?

What's their attitude towards not just their gardens, but also, you know, kind of society?

How do they see themselves?

Twiggs is also the author of a book called Garden Gnomes, a History.

Gnomes are absolutely fascinating.

They're incredibly divisive.

People either love them or hate them.

You know, some people make, oh, this garden isn't for us.

And they make assumptions about the gnomes.

They make assumptions about the people that have the gnomes that they are basically rather tasteless.

And that's kind of predicated, they think, on the history of the gnomes.

I'm delighted about this because I, if I see a garden gnome in a yard in America, I'm just like, you have plastic schlock in your yard and I don't understand this.

Yeah.

And I don't understand what you're trying to tell me.

I think it's tacky.

Just like you said, but but I'm about to learn all the ways that I should interrogate that feeling.

Well, that's the thing.

You just have to step back from everything you think you know about them, take a great big breath and go, right, where are we starting with this?

Hang on, why do we actually even have a small figure in the garden?

Where do these come from?

And the answer is not mid-century suburbia.

So what if I took you back to Rome and we could for a moment go back in time and I took you into one of the gardens in Pompeii.

So, instead of this plastic, no, brightly coloured, you would see in that courtyard garden maybe 20 statues, small statues, all brightly coloured, all painted of little figures, some of them pissing against a wall, some of them, you know, pissing up against a fountain.

Would that still be tackless schlock, you know, or would that be, wow, it's Roman?

Centuries later, rich people in the Renaissance and Baroque eras knew their answer.

That's when the tradition of putting little statues in gardens began in earnest because it seemed like a connection to the Roman past.

Well, there are all these statues again, colorfully painted, playing musical instruments, that kind of thing.

These little figures could be found in elegant gardens across Europe.

The statues, however, depict people, characters out of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte,

not gnomes.

To get to the gnome, we then have to mix in the idea of the pan-European idea in fact of the little folk that we can't quite see, you know, that you glimpse out of the corner of your eye.

Fairies, leprechauns, brownies, sprites, nearly every country has their own version of the mythical little creature.

But the most direct connection to lawn ornaments are the little folk in the mining communities of Central Europe.

Who would help or hinder, depending on their moods, in the mine.

Have they always had the cute little hats?

They've always had hats, always had hats.

And the reason they have hats is because when you're down the mine, you need to have head protection.

And the pointy hat has padding in it.

It's like an early safety helmet.

Amazing!

So the first thing that hits the mine top is your padded, pointed red hat.

Artisans in Central Europe began turning these little folk into little figurines, carving them out of wood as good luck charms, or casting them in ceramic.

And in the 19th century, one mining village in the center of Germany would become the gnome capital of the world.

This is Sven Berar.

He works at Zwergstadt Grafen Rodap, a small ceramic gnome workshop in the state of Thuringia that's turning 150 this year.

We sent a German producer to help us record him in his shop.

And why this town?

Why did this town become the center?

Sven told me that in the 1800s, the area was rich in clay deposits, and so a flourishing ceramics industry grew in the village.

The process they used for making gnome figurines hasn't changed much since then.

The ground clay is mixed following a secret recipe, and then it's poured into molds.

After drying for several days, it's removed, scraped clean, and fired in a kiln.

Once it's cooled down, the gnome can be hand-painted.

And that part is Fenn's specialty.

It's all a delicate, painstaking process, a far cry from the plastic gnomes you find in a Home Depot today.

And Twiggs Way says it's the artistry artistry of these little figurines that caught the eye of English tourists taking fashionable pajants to Germany in the 19th century.

They see these figures, very nicely made, very expensive, hand-painted, hand-molded, all the rest of it, and they buy them as tourist mementos and take them back home with them to England.

As the figurines entered England, they took on a new name.

gnomes.

Most of the tourists importing these handcrafted German goods were very wealthy, and they installed these gnomes indoors.

They used them as dining table ornaments or place card holders.

But then a man named Sir Charles Isham had the fateful idea of moving them outside.

So we always look back to him as the person who kind of introduced the gnome to the garden.

But he is eccentric.

You might say that quite a few of the aristocratic classes in those days were eccentric.

He is particularly eccentric.

He is a vegetarian.

He's anti-hunting.

He's a firm believer in mesmerism, in mediums, in spiritualism.

And his connection with the gnomes comes about because he actually believes that dwarves and gnomes and little folk really exist.

Sir Charles decides to construct a giant alpine rock garden or a rockery on his estate.

And he thinks gnomes will make it look more realistic.

And so he decides he's going to put these little figures from the inside of the house out onto the rockery.

It's right in front of his bedroom window, actually, it's right next to the hall itself.

And he makes little groups of them with little signs and all the rest of it.

And he really starts the thing off.

Sir Charles Isham's gnome-populated garden was featured in horticultural magazines from the time.

Soon, other eccentric aristocrats were heading off to Germany to follow his lead, and an entire gnome industry emerged.

Sven Berar says the gnome workshops began to sprout up like mushrooms in the small village of Greifenrode.

At the turn of the century, they had 13 companies solely dedicated to manufacturing gnomes, and a single workshop might produce 500 to 600 different models.

But in England, it only took a few decades before the fad started to wane, as rich people began to look askance at garden gnomes as just a little too eccentric.

And then something else got in the way.

First World War breaks out.

That close connection between Germany doesn't play well with the idea of having gnomes and dwarfs back in this country.

In Germany, many of the gnome workshops were shut down due to the war.

Sven says some managed to reopen afterward.

But under the Nazi regime, garden gnomes were shunned.

After World War II, the new East German government officially banned gnome production as unsocialistic.

One workshop was forced to switch to making ceramic busts of Marx and Engels.

And that might have been it for the garden gnome,

if not for Walt Disney.

Now you may have thought that Snow White and the Seven Dwarves were seven dwarves, but actually Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are nothing more or less than seven garden gnomes.

And that is when the whole dismalification of the gnome happens.

An enormous wave of popularity of these small dwarf figurines, cheaply made, cheaply available, mostly in concrete.

And it pushes the price right down.

It makes them enormously part of popular culture.

So, anybody that can afford to go to the cinema, you know, next stop, the nearest hardware store or whatever, to pick up your Snow White Seven Dwarves and put them in your garden.

This was happening on both sides of the Atlantic, and it only ramped up further as some gnomes started to be manufactured in plastic, which made them even cheaper and more colorful.

You can now affordably pepper your yard with dozens of gnomes whose looks had been Disneyfied too.

They take on this really kind of baby-ish look, you know, with the big bulbous nose and big bulbous cheeks and the cute.

Yeah, they're very, depending how you feel cute is.

And they are just no longer associated with upper-class gardens.

They are associated with, you know, suburban gardens.

I think this is relevant to understanding where anti-gnome sentiment originated.

It's not because gnomes began as middle-class kitsch.

It's because they began as upper-class status objects.

And it's only when they dared to descend into suburban lawns they were dismissed as cheap and tasteless.

To me, I mean, a gnome is just a chunk of concrete.

I mean,

it's a bit weird.

And once they were there outside regular people's homes, gardening magazines called them out as eyesores.

Realtors begged homeowners to hide them.

In the 1970s, various satirical organizations with names like the Gnome Liberation Front began secreting them out of gardens in the dark of night.

In their place was this note.

To whom it may concern, we regret to say that to endeavour to keep the gnome population at zero growth rate for this area, we have redistributed a number of your gnomes to areas of low population in order to stabilize urbanal numbers through the nation.

So they're very, very popular.

They then are decided to be fairly tasteless and associated with, you know, NAF suburban gardens.

And then, you know, they have a revival as being a sort of kitsch thing and then they become unpopular again.

It just ebbs and flows all the time.

Right now, it seems like we might be in an upswing.

Twig says she's been getting a lot of calls for comments about gnomes.

This winter, the new Wallace and Gromit movie will center around a garden gnome, Gone Rogue, and this comes on the heels of animated films like Nomeo and Juliet and Sherlock Gnomes.

We have to get across that river.

We'll need a ship.

No ship, Sherlock.

Sven's gnome workshop, which reopened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now goes through six tons of clay each year.

You can stop by to watch them work or host your birthday party there.

And they even have a little gnome museum.

Sven says that some of their visitors come in scoffing at gnomes as kitsch.

But then, once they see the work that goes into a gnome and understand the history behind them, some of them change their mind and go home with one.

As ever, though, gnomes are not for everyone,

including Twigsway herself.

And the reason is I have a very wild country-fied garden.

So it's not that I don't have gnomes.

I don't have any artificial thing in the garden.

We started with your great metaphor that a garden is like an underwear drawer.

If you walk into someone's garden, into their underwear drawer, and you see a gnome, what are they telling you?

What is it communicating?

Actually, nowadays, they're mainly telling me that they're quite fun and they don't care what other people think about them.

One person actually recently said to me that she had a collection of gnomes in her front garden and she knows that people either kind of love them or hate them, but she said she sees people walk past and smile when they see her gnomes because they're fun.

And I, you know, I mean, what's wrong with having fun in your garden?

And actually, that's probably what's

missing from my garden.

But fun isn't all lawn ornaments can be.

And if our yards are like our underwear drawers, when we come back, we're going to look at some of America's dirty laundry.

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So gnomes are fun, but that word does not describe every lawn ornament.

Not at all.

And this is so much the case, the ones we're going to talk about next don't show up in yards very often anymore.

They're more likely to be found in museums.

We're walking through, we're at a section which shows a lot of objects that are in, would be in someone's kitchen, for example.

And if you notice, if you look closely at the objects, you'll see that a lot of the features, the physical features of African Americans have been distorted.

David Pilgrim is the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Michigan.

So what we do is we show how Jim Crow was not only supported by violence, but also everyday objects.

The objects in the museum include racist postcards, cookie jars, sheet music, toys, salt shakers, a Christmas tree topper shaped like a Klansman, items that are sometimes called contemptible collectibles.

We have over 30,000 pieces and I mean, we certainly are the world's largest collection of objects like this, and it's not even close.

And there's an entire corner of the museum dedicated entirely to one lawn ornament.

Yeah, so these are these are lawn jockeys, yeah.

Lawn jockeys are statues that are a few feet high and that typically depict a black man in horse riding clothes.

Sometimes they're called darkies, sometimes they're called sambo.

These often were metal, although I'm not sure what these are.

I think this is metal.

I mean, they're heavy as hell.

The earliest lawn jockeys are hundreds of years old, but they, like most of the contemptible collectibles, became widespread in the second half of the 19th century.

Black collectibles really started after the Civil War, largely during Reconstruction, and they all showed African Americans happy, happy to be working for the master.

Kenneth Goings is an emeritus professor of African American and African history at Ohio State University, and he's the author of Mammy and Uncle Mose, a book about black collectibles.

And they were part of a whole mythology that was being developed after Reconstruction that the South had had a spatial civilization and had a special relationship with the enslaved people and that if the North had just left them alone, things would have been fine.

Literally, the Darkies would be happy.

So there's this whole attempt to create this mythology physically through the creation of these objects.

In the last few decades, Kenneth has seen most white people accept that the objects pushing this narrative are abhorrent.

The collectibles like Mammy cookie jars and Sambo dolls are in fact contemptible.

And that has continued and has gotten even stronger.

There's been even a stronger rejection of the collectibles, except for the lawn jockeys.

Really?

I know both black and white people who still see the lawn jockeys as a very positive image.

And this is because the history of the lawn jockey is complicated and full of competing stories about their origins.

The earliest iterations from the mid-19th century didn't depict a jockey at all, but instead an enslaved groomsman or stableboy, often in raggedy clothes but eagerly working.

Like the other collectibles, they were always doing something, still being put to work.

The figure is often holding out a ring in his right hand that a horse could be hitched to, or carrying a lantern to light the driveway.

By the late 1800s, the statue had started to wear the clothes of a horse jockey, a riding cap and racing boots.

There were black jockeys.

We need to establish that.

And there were black jockeys who were Kentucky Derby winners.

In fact, African Americans dominated horse racing.

But by the 1900s, the sport was becoming segregated.

And as actual black jockeys were being pushed out, injured, and pulled off their horses, a new kind of lawn jockey started to be manufactured.

So these two right here, those would be the ones I think most people would be seeing today.

David Pilgrim at the Jim Crow Museum again.

The last one is shorter than the others and heavily caricatured with, you know, the natural features of African Americans caricatured to the point of an insult.

These jockeys have pitch black skin and big red lips forming a wide grin.

And in the middle of the 20th century, they became ubiquitous in the lawns of a new kind of homeowner, white suburban ones.

The average American can now own a home and a more luxurious home than he ever dared dream of.

After World War II, suburban development boomed as white homeownership was being subsidized by the federal government and as the Second Great Migration triggered what Kenneth Goings describes as a racial panic in the North.

Because you have even more African Americans moving north, and there's more need to control African Americans and try and keep them in their place.

And that's when the racial restrictions and the racial covenants start.

Well, I just could not live inside them.

I don't feel that they should be oppressed.

But I moved here.

One of the main reasons was because it was a white community.

And these lawn jockeys were sort of a marker, sort of a signal to black people that you weren't wanted here.

The lawn jockey was a signal of what we think of you.

And you didn't have to put up a sign.

You just had to put out a lawn jockey.

Do you remember seeing them as a kid?

Yes.

Yes.

And we're talking about a little tiny farming town in northwest Ohio of about 3,000 people.

I didn't really think about them too much, just knew that those people didn't like black people.

The history of the lawn jockey thus far shows them to be nothing but odious.

Yet Kenneth has encountered people who think otherwise.

I don't know why of all the collectives, people just sincerely believe that somehow these went racist.

This belief stems from another story about how the lawn jockey came to be.

A story set in 1776 that involves one of our founding fathers.

So when George Washington was crossing the Delaware during the War of Independence, he had his horses with him.

But there was an African-American man who wanted to help the American forces.

So what he did is he had his son hold the the horses on the riverbank as they rolled across to attack the British forces.

The boy's name was Jocko Graves, and the story goes, even as an ice storm raged around him, he faithfully carried out his duty, never abandoning the troops' horses.

And when they returned after having successfully defeated the British, that little boy was frozen.

holding the horses.

George Washington, moved by Jocko's noble deed, commissioned a statue of him titled The Faithful Groomsman.

It would become the model for all future lawn jockeys and put in a place of honor at his home.

And Mount Vernon, in tribute to his sacrifice.

And that.

It's total nonsense.

Scholars of George Washington have looked into it, and they found no evidence that Jocko Graves ever existed or that any statue like this was ever on display at Mount Vernon, an estate where Washington kept slaves.

But the legend that the lawn jockey is actually a tribute to a black hero has persisted for decades, and it's alive and well online.

You wonder where the lawn jockey came from?

You can thank George Washington.

Yes, many people out there have the wrong information, but in fact, it is a statue that represents a hero.

That little boy holding the straps of those horses.

True story.

The next time you see one of these, think of Jocko.

Videos like these, emails, and viral posts circulate all the time, purporting to reveal the true story of the Lonjockey's origins.

There are even children's books celebrating Jocko as a real American hero.

David Pilgrim's been hearing it for as long as he can remember.

I've heard that story from some historians.

Certainly I heard it growing up in African-American communities.

And it's a good story.

It's a chest puffer.

It's a feel-good story, and it didn't happen.

But it's just part of a whole mythology that grew up about these collectibles, I think, to make them more acceptable.

The legend of George Washington and Jocko Graves isn't the only story out there that suggests there's more to the lawn jockey.

That despite its caricatured appearance, it's actually a symbol of African-American resistance.

Well, and that's just as bizarre.

And that is that these lawn jockeys were part of the Underground Railroad, that they signaled to the conductors on the Underground Underground Railroad which houses were safe places.

The story goes that a ribbon would be tied to the lawn jockey.

If it was green, it meant that it was safe to bring in the runaways.

If the ribbon was red, it signaled danger and to keep moving on.

What I would say is enslavement lasted so long in this country that my general answer to whether or not something occurred is, yeah, it probably did occur.

Because you're talking about a couple hundred years, but there's no evidence that that was common at all.

The myths about the Underground Railroad are legion.

I mean, if every myth about the Underground Railroad were true, there would have been no slaves left in the South.

How often have you encountered the suggestion that because of these stories, lawn jockeys are somehow not racist?

Oh, constantly, constantly.

From black people also.

Oh, yes, oh no, from both, from both.

And both are as sincere about it as the other.

They really do believe it.

Well, yeah, I mean, there are actually people that are upset when you say, well, that

likely didn't happen.

David understands, though, why black people in particular might want a story like this to be true.

From most of the experience of black people in this country, you know, every major societal institution was designed to make folks feel like they hadn't done anything, that they hadn't contributed and weren't deserving of fair treatment.

In a way, false narratives are still pushback, but I don't want to leave it there.

We don't need to make up stories.

There have just been wonderful stories of African American heroism, African-American achievement, African-Americans living lives of everyday dignity.

So instead of us promoting stories that aren't accurate, we need to uncover those that are and then celebrate them.

David still sees lawn jockeys in people's yards from time to time.

You'll also find new ones that are being made because they're still a market.

In terms of today, if you have one in your yard today, you've made some decisions.

Sometimes you see them painted white, as if their significance can be changed or covered up or literally whitewashed.

But David doesn't think that's really possible or necessary.

If I want to build a statue that honors a black person, there's no limit to how much of that I can do.

I'd be less interested in reclaiming it and more interested in just building new statues.

Coming up next: a lawn ornament that wasn't a statue at all.

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So far, we've been talking about figurines that are modeled more or less on people, whether caricatured or mythological.

But what if lawn ornaments weren't just modeled on people?

What if once upon a time

they were people?

Like listen to this job listing a wealthy landowner supposedly placed in an English newspaper in the middle of the 18th century.

Mr.

Charles Hamilton, the proprietor of Paines Hill near Cobham, Surrey, advertised for a person who was willing to become a hermit in that beautiful retreat of his.

When the landowner says hermit, he means an actual human being willing to live in solitude.

In this case, they would be required to reside in a little room dug into the side of a hill in a garden.

The conditions were that he should be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his bed, an hourglass for his timepiece, food from the house, but never to exchange a word with the servant.

The hermit would have to wear a robe at all times and was forbidden from ever cutting his beard or his nails or from leaving the grounds, all for a period of seven years.

If he lived there under these restrictions till the end of the term, he was to receive 700 guineas.

But on breach of any of them, the whole was to be forfeited.

We don't know if anyone actually made it through the seven years at this particular estate, but people were really seeking living, breathing, human hermits for their gardens.

Yes, yes, they did hire hermits.

Ned Harwood, who you heard reading that ad, is an art historian who studies gardens, especially 18th-century English landscape gardens.

Now, these are big gardens.

They're like 25 acres to 250 acres, even 1,000 acres.

These are about the same size as the gardens you heard about earlier, belonging to the eccentrics who had garden gnomes.

But it's more than a century before that trend.

Ned says you can study the history of garden styles the way you do the history of painting, with one movement evolving into the next, the Baroque giving way to the Rococo.

And in the early 1700s in England, one thing was giving way to another.

There is a movement towards making gardens more natural.

Now, I'm putting natural in quotes because they're completely manufactured.

It's completely artificial.

But instead of, let's say, in a 17th century French garden where you have topiary trimmed hedges that are 30 feet high and things like that, the 18th century garden that begins to emerge in England in the 1720s and 1730s is quite deliberately planting in a much more naturalistic way.

So it doesn't look like it's all been carefully put there and maintained.

And inside these new natural gardens, they began building a new type of garden structure.

Ancient-looking buildings meant to trigger what Ned describes as imaginative flights of fancy.

Temples to Greek gods, Chinese pavilions, Gothic ruins.

But if you were going to put in one building,

By the middle of the 18th century, that building would be a building you would call a hermitage.

What is a hermitage?

Definitionally, what makes something a hermitage is that a hermit lives there.

The tradition of hermits has existed in the West for more than a thousand years.

Early Christian fathers renounced all their possessions and went into the desert to live in isolation.

Medieval monks and nuns found monasteries were not secluded enough, so they set up homes in swamps and caves to get closer to God.

These people who are willing to go away and totally abase themselves,

nonetheless are the people that people go to for instruction.

They go to for guidance.

They go to for enlightenment.

And it doesn't carry like the same charge it does for us of being like weirdo.

No.

One chooses to be a hermit.

It is choosing to give up being well fed, being well housed, being any of those things.

So hermits were admired for their ability to separate, admired for their ability to walk away, and seen as people who, as a result of that, could actually comment on society.

By the time of the 18th century garden, religious hermits had more or less disappeared from the English landscape.

But the hermit as an idea was still highly valued.

And so as wealthy landowners started decking out their gardens with fake old structures, many of them decided to build hermit homes.

A hermitage itself can take many, many different forms.

They can look like very elegant little pavilions, but most of them are quite rustic.

The most famous of them are often what were called root huts.

If you are a hermit living in the woods, what are you going to build to live in?

You don't have a saw.

You don't have anything like that.

You're going to cobble something together.

And so they would cobble these structures together out of roots, out of twigs.

Other hermitages were caves dug into a mound, or what they imagined ancient druids lived in.

There are books of designs published in the 18th century of hermitages.

Was it like a catalog?

Like, was it books of design so you could do it yourself?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's great stuff.

Many of the hermitages built into English gardens were designed as sites of contemplation for the landowners who would gaze across their gardens at their huts made of roots and twigs and dream about what it would be like to live a life of solitude.

Most of the time, they were uninhabited, but decorated to give the illusion that someone lived there.

Like they might have a book sitting open on a desk next to a half-melted candle to imply that a hermit had just stepped out.

There was sort of a common interior design concept for what you put in a hermitage.

Even if there was not a hermit ever there.

It's ready for a hermit.

Yeah, it's ready for a hermit.

And sometimes an actual hermit would arrive?

Sometimes.

And this is where you get the stories like the one you heard at the beginning.

It's unclear if that one is entirely authentic, but landowners did put out classified ads for ornamental garden hermits.

One of these texts that is really interesting.

The landowner has created a suite of underground rooms, which are exquisitely kitted out.

There's an organ down there.

It's a luxurious suite of rooms underground.

Whoever comes to live in it is to have absolutely no contact with another human being.

And so this is a scientific experiment, masquerading as a hermit.

What will happen to that person?

And sometimes it worked the other way around with people essentially cold calling landlords to say, hey, do you have a hut in your yard I could crash in?

And these are people who are down on their luck.

They write to a landowner and say, I will come and live in your estate as a hermit if you will feed me and house me.

Sit there, you know, with a long beard and their fingernails all grown out and a cross and a Bible and just sit there because it's better, I guess, than the life that they have.

If offering yourself up as an ornamental hermit was a way to eke out an existence, then hiring a hermit was a way to show off the wealth you already had.

It was such a status symbol that if you couldn't have a living one, you might try to create the illusion that you did.

There's a wonderful garden called Hawkstone that had a root hut hermitage, and there was a hermit living there.

And then that hermit leaves, we don't know why, and he's replaced by a mannequin hermit of some sort.

So there were mannequin hermits as well that would be put into these places.

We know about a wooden hermit that was an automata that could talk to people.

I need, I need, like, I

I actually don't, I don't even, I'm having a hard time imagining even anything about how that could exist.

How does it work?

It would be driven by air pressure, which would be driven by water pressure.

Okay.

Ned explained a little further and I read some more about it, but honestly, I still don't get it.

And while I know that all of this is supposed to be about contemplation and solitude and other serious things,

I can't help hearing about wooden hermit robots and thinking it just sounds silly.

Well, it is frivolous.

It also is, I think, important to keep in mind that people in the 18th century had a great sense of humor, right?

I mean, they laughed at stuff.

I mean, the Garden of Stowe had several hermitages, one of which, which was a root hut,

had utterly lascivious, scabbrous texts and pictures on the walls inside of it.

Like just dirty jokes.

Dirty jokes about hermits.

And so you were supposed to go in there and laugh.

So ultimately, we end up pretty much where we started, with the naughty Roman statues that led to garden gnomes.

And like gnomes, hermits are multivalent.

They're constantly evolving signifiers of class and taste that sometimes are just for laughs.

But unlike gnomes, the phenomenon of ornamental hermits did not last, thanks to a shift in garden styles and in part the rise in Britain of abolitionism.

Keeping a hermit to some extent becomes problematized because there is uncertainty in the community, the local community, as to whether the person is being kept against their will or not.

So we know of liberated hermits.

I mean, people who are freed from being hermits, one of whom did not want to be liberated from being a hermit.

He was quite content to be a hermit.

And he's sort of this forced back out into the the world.

By the middle of the 19th century, I think it's done.

Which it turns out is right around the time that a few eccentric English aristocrats started putting a different kind of bearded figure, a gnome, in their gardens.

And actually, Ned doesn't really think that was the end for hermitages.

He says the idea behind them still endures.

That the truly harmonious life is a life that is a combination of periods of active engagement when you're out in the world doing something and then periods of absolutely necessary retreat when you don't do anything and you recharge your jets and and this is the purest manifestation of that idea of contemplative retreat like we all think about okay we need to like recharge you need self-care whatever it is like you need vacation all of those things whether we actually do it or not

we all talk about it i say i'm not going to answer email this weekend right right i'm going to turn off my my phone all those kinds of disconnections are i think or you know that that phenomenon a couple the man cave right a man cave is a hermitage as far as i'm concerned they're places to get away and we feel the need to get away i i think that desire and that felt need to get away is still very much with us

So earlier in this episode, you heard me say that I was skeptical about garden gnomes.

To be honest, I was skeptical about all of the lawn ornaments.

I have never ever considered having one, and not just because until recently, I didn't have a lawn to put one in.

Having all these conversations has made me feel a little differently about them, though.

I would obviously never have a lawn jockey, and I wouldn't want a hermit, even if there was still a thing.

But a little gnome hiding out in some corner that passers-by would only see if they were really looking, really noticing the things around them?

A gnome to make them laugh, either at the gnome itself or the person kooky enough to have one.

A gnome to inspire some imaginative flight of fancy?

Who knows?

Maybe I'll have to find a spot for one.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by Evan Chung and Willip Haskin, and it was produced by Evan.

We produced decodering with Katie Shepard and Max Friedman.

We had additional production by Shana Roth and Martina Weber.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

We'd like to thank Friedemann Brenice, Heather Joseph Witham, and Elise Gramza.

Gordon Campbell's book, The Hermit in the Garden, was a valuable resource in putting together this episode.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

And if you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering and every other Slate podcast without any ads.

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And member support is crucial to our work, so please go to slate.com/slash decoderplus to join Slate Plus today.

We'll see you in two two weeks.

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