Gnome More Rules: A Day at Chelsea Flower Show With the Unbanned Garden Gnomes
Once branded “tacky,” the garden statues were officially banned from the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show in 1927. Today, they’re back, celebrity-designed and up for auction.
Reported by Vogue.
Garden gnomes have spent nearly a century as the forbidden fruit of the horticultural world — too kitschy, too chaotic, too fun for the hallowed grounds of London's RHS Chelsea Flower Show. But for only the second time since their 1927 ban, the little clay creatures are back, and they brought some seriously high-profile painters with them.
According to Vogue, the gnome prohibition has been lifted in service of a charity auction benefiting the RHS school gardening campaign — with miniature figurines hand-painted by Cate Blanchett, Dame Mary Berry, Sir Brian May, Sir David Beckham, and even King Charles himself. The bids reflect the pecking order accordingly: May's gnome had climbed to $3,000 at time of writing, Berry's to $900, and Blanchett's — somewhat mysteriously — to just $400. The auction closes May 24. RHS director general Clare Matterson framed it simply: "We want people to be playful with their gardening." Comedian Bill Bailey, also a gnome artist, went further, tracing the word back to the Latin gnomus — earth dweller — and pointing out that the Romans used them as garden guardians. "They have been much maligned," he said. Hard to argue.
Cate's Gnome Has Range
Blanchett's contribution is, predictably, the most fashion-forward of the lot — a scarlet ruffled hat, cobalt-blue face, and sweeping green cape that reads less garden ornament, more avant-garde runway. It tracks: earlier this week at Cannes, Blanchett wore a fringe-detailed floral gown from Sarah Burton's fall 2026 Givenchy collection in burnt orange and red. Even in ceramic form, the woman has a point of view. Her gnome reportedly took a brief field trip out of its glass cabinet to sip Pimm's, meet a newly debuted rose named after Kate Moss, and tour the Best in Show garden — Sarah Eberle's design for the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
The broader show was no less maximalist. Beyond the main grounds, a free flower festival with an "Out of this World" theme delivered a Saturn sculpted from burnt orange ranunculus, a four-meter floral dragon, a Pegasus, and an extravagant rose installation framing the Cartier boutique. Inside the show proper, gnomes as small as a thimble perched on shrubs, a queue formed around an elaborately carved wooden figure, and one mysterious banged creature hid deep in the foliage — a wink to the reportedly self-relocating gnome rumored to roam King Charles's private Highgrove gardens. Of course.
What Chelsea 2025 ultimately proves is that fashion and horticulture have always shared the same obsession: the precise, slightly absurd business of making something beautiful and calling it serious — and sometimes, all it takes is a three-inch ceramic man in a pointed hat to make the whole thing click.
Read the original at Vogue.
