For Sale
But the good news was that the Gnomes sold as soon as the garage doors were opened. Fortunately the gnomes were not split up. They all went to one happy Lady.
The garage sale was held in aid of several children's charities who would eventually benefit by several hundred pounds.
Gnomes new look
Garden gnomes are to be given a 21st century makeover with their old-style fishing rods being ditched for mobile phones and laptop computers.
Declining sales of the loveable characters have led to the drastic action, with sales now said to be so low that retailers fear they could soon become extinct. Now supermarket chain Tesco has asked manufacturers to update the little figures.
Watch this space.....
Spring clean for Gnomes
Fritz Luhken dusts one of the more than 180 garden gnomes on his lawn in Bad Zwischenahn, Lower Saxony. The pensioner started collecting the statues after he received one as a birthday gift in 1971. At the end of the summer he cleans and waxes them and stores them in the cellar to sit out the winter. Visitors come to admire the crowd almost every day during the season.
Strasbourg, France
More than 100 garden gnomes and other statues have been found assembled on a roundabout in eastern France,a police spokesman said.
Some were set up to spell out "Free the Gnomes" leading police believe that the culprits are members of a group known as the Garden Gnome Liberation Front. Residents around the town of chavelot reported the miniatures stolen the night before. Soon after they were found set up on the roundabout.
The spokesman said: " It was a bit like a giant creche. Everything had been carefully set up." The group, which advocates "freeing" gnomes and "returning them to the wild," gained public attention in the 1900's.
But after a ringleader was fined and sent to prison in 1997 for his part in the disappearance of 150 gnomes, the group faded from the limelight. In 1998 it came back into the public eye after staging a mass "suicide" with 11 gnomes dangling by their necks under a bridge at Briey in eastern France."
A letter found nearby said: "When you read these few words we will no longer be part of your selfish world, where we serve merely as pretty decoration."
A Paris garden exhibition was the group's target last year, where they stole about 20 gnomes during a night raid.
Naked gnomes cover up
A former Army sergeant has been threatened with arrest after a complaint that his five garden gnomes were too cheeky. A police officer in Barnsley, S Yorkshire, told Tony Watson, that he could be reported under the Public Order Offences Act and the two-feet-tall ornaments confiscated unless he removed them.
His collection includes one peeing in a bucket, a female gnome fully exposed and another revealing her breasts.
Mr Watson, a builder's labourer, has now concealed the offending areas with plaster and paint.
By Paul Stokes