I don't really know where my garden-gnome fixation comes from. Maybe because my pediatrician had one of those old Gnomes books in his office, which may have been the first place I ever saw pictures of naked people (well, in this case, gnomes, I guess). But for whatever reason they pop up in my writing on numerous occasions. I consider lawn ornamentation in general to be a worthy subject, so alternately this could simply be an anglophilic manifestation of a general interest in vernacular public art...

Apparently I am not the only one, either.