Photo by Jack Sorokin
“I watched a TED Talk once that said even if you don’t think you collect things, you totally collect something,” says Leigh Armistead, who can’t pretend otherwise anymore. Sitting in her upstairs loft which serves as both an office and toy room for her two children, Armistead laughs as she motions to the ceramic figurine gnomes that are tucked around the room and hastily rounded up on the floor for a special viewing. All of them are completely different, ranging in size and color, but still very much traditional garden gnomes, complete with pot belly and pointed caps.
“One day I just became the Gnome Lady and I embraced it,” she says, laughing. “I mean, why not?”
Its been a decade, but Armistead is still a little perplexed by how her collection came to be. She estimates that she owns about 40 sculpture gnomes. All of them have their own names and their own stories of how they came to her. Throughout her home in West Asheville, one can find at least one gnome-related item at every turn— and that’s not even counting the actual garden.
“Most of my gnomes were gifted to me,” Armistead explains. “I didn’t necessarily choose to collect them — but once I accepted it as my ‘thing’ I’ve started to seek them out for myself as well.”
Her association with gnomes all started with a photo-album idea she had while counseling at a local summer camp. “I wanted to take pictures of my time at camp but didn’t want to be in the photos,” she says. She’d just seen the French film Amelie, and she borrowed the movie’s gimmick where a garden gnome is photographed in various travel locales. “I thought it would be a good idea to copy the scene in the film, using a garden gnome as a replacement for myself. People saw me doing that and were so confused and intrigued that it just stuck.”
Now a librarian at A.C. Reynolds High School, Armistead notes that her students were the first supporters of her collection. “When I would help out with school musicals, the tech students would always gift me a gnome after the show’s run.”
She reaches down into the cluster of figurines that have been standing guard at her feet and turns over one that is leaning atop a mushroom. On the bottom of his shoe are tiny signatures of the light-tech students from that year’s production; on the other foot, in big letters, is the name Peter Pinecone. “I usually name them if someone else doesn’t beat me to it,” says Armistead. “People get really excited for me — I love the amount of personality that goes with it.”
After gaining her reputation, Armistead began using her collection as a way to keep track of her travels or important milestones in her life. She holds out a red-and-gold gnome which came from her trip to China; then a fat, grinning one that her now sister-in-law brought back from Australia. A stout, whiskery one with his hat pulled all the way down to his beard commemorates the pregnancy of her first daughter, now 4 years old. (She also has a 4-month-old baby girl.)
Photo by Jack Sorokin
“They all have a story one way or another,” she smiles. “It’s silly — but it makes it all worth it.”
In the main family room, a statue of a gnome couple holding up a leaf peers down from a high shelf. It’s the only pair in her collection, and Armistead reveals that her husband used the sculpture to propose to her one day after contra dancing.
“He got me to go outside because he said he had just found them in the yard, and as he held them up I saw the ring on the leaf,” she remembers. “And here I was thinking it was just a fun thing I was associated with. Now we were all in.”
Her older daughter leads the way to a flower pot sitting on the porch. A small sign stuck into the soil reads “fairy garden” — but it seems that the fairies have been forced to find better real estate. Between tiny homes and wire flowers stand tiny statuettes of gnomes resembling the bigger models inside. Like her mom, the little girl seems to get a gleeful joy from looking at the gnomes’ small, chubby smiles.
“I guess it’s a family affair at this point,” Armistead says, watching her daughter. “You could say they’ve become family themselves.”