Ultra Rich People Problems: They Used to Hire Real-Life Garden Gnomes to Live on Their Estates
The curious case of what inspired our cheesy garden statues
I’m sure you’ve spotted them in your many travels. Some of you may have even had the bad luck of knocking one over, spilling out their ceramic guts onto the soft earth below.
Of course, I’m talking about garden gnomes.
Those silent g-having faux-furry little creepy beasts that adorn so many of our front lawns, lord knows why.
But rewind 300 years ago, and you probably wouldn’t have wanted to spill one of their guts out on the ground. There’d be a lot more blood and probably a few screams.
Garden Rich
Back in the 18th Century, France and England had a problem. Or to be more specific, their uber-rich people had a problem.
Too much money and nothing to do with it. (Tough life, right?)
Building giant, grandiose estates seemed to be the only solution among this cohort of the elite. Other than building factory upon factory to extort the working class, of course.
As the centuries wove by and the need to one-up your maybe-slightly-richer neighbor became a pressing need, the idea of…
