Liz Spera's fascination with gnomes and the fantasy world they inhabit started 27 years ago and has never waned.

Now she wants to spread the fascination with the rest of the world through a new gnome-centric museum and visitors' center she plans to open at her home.

The rural Auburn resident has collected more than 2,000 different gnomes - offshoots of the garden gnome sculptures that inhabit yards in various incarnations, rubbing tiny shoulders with pink flamingos and other lawn ornaments.

For Spera and a cadre of collectors around the world, gnomes represent all that is good that comes from the earth and the forests. Spera said the museum she is now creating with the help of her husband in the family barn will help fuel people's fantasies and free their imaginations.

 

The second floor of the barn will house a gnome library with gnome-related books and gnome games and puzzles, where people can sip a cup of herbal tea and peruse the fantasy world of inspired troll painters like Rien Poortvliet."I want it to be a magical place for people to stop and look around," Spera said. "They can look at the trees, hear the birds, look off into the valley and see how quiet and serene things can be."

Spera envisions school and senior groups visiting to learn more about troll folklore. All nations seem to have little people in their stories, she noted. In the United States, "Snow White & The Seven Dwarves" and the Travelocity gnome are two of the more modern pop-culture images. And then there are all those garden ornaments.

Spera will display many of her prized trolls. They come in a plethora of poses and sizes, with terra cotta ones providing the gold standard for quality. Others are made with cement, plastic, wood and porcelain.

Spera, 50, lives on a five-acre parcel with her husband, Joe, 13-year-old son J.T., horses, 18 chickens and a dog. The couple at one time in the early 1990s owned the No. 1 male Norwich terrier in the nation and showed it at the American Kennel Club's Westminster Dog Show, where it received an award of merit. Spera, a district advisor in the Auburn Journal's circulation department, said she wasn't satisfied with the way VH1 TV's "Totally Obsessed" treated her collection in a November 2004 segment but has hopes that an independent production team filming a pilot for a prospective TV show on hobbies will be more sensitive to an assemblage of trolls that has the potential to bring plenty of joy to people in coming years.

"We need more things that stimulate the imagination without TV," Spera said.

Spera's opening of what she plans to name Gnome Habitat USA could take place as early as this spring. It's partly modelled on a gnome reserve in North Devon, England that attracts an average of 25,000 people a year. Visitors don red gnome hats to wander through various gnome-filled landscapes.

"Gnomes represent childlike qualities," Spera said. "They're old but they're also youthful, like children."

Whether they're leprechauns in Ireland, kabouters in Holland, gnoms in Poland or erdmanleins in Germany, they capture hearts and pop up like magic in gardens and fields. They're good luck charms that originated in Scandinavia before migrating to other nations around 1500.

Jean Fenstermaker, of Santa Rosa, who has been collecting gnomes for 30 years and owns almost 700 examples, said she thinks Spera's plans are wonderful.

"It'll help allow other people become familiar with collecting," Fenstermaker said.



By: Gus Thomson, Journal Staff Writer
Sunday, February 12, 2006

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