Gnomes love pots, and Shirley wasn’t sure what to do with that information. All she knew was that she needed hundreds more. Ever since she had moved into her new home, she had entered into a world of pots and gnomes she wasn’t aware even existed.
It all started when she decided to add a bit of greenery into her space by jumping on the designer indoor plant craze. Her friends all had pots filled with lush foliage and beautiful flowers, creating breathtaking displays in their houses. She wanted in on it too.
She had even gone so far as to adopt a gigantic fiddle leaf fig (which had led into a long dive into the rabbit hole of extra large pots for plants). The next morning, after she had carefully placed the towering plant into its cachepot the day before, she had found the pot tipped over. Soil had littered her floor.
Upon further inspection, she had found a gnome with a pointy hat burrowed into the warm soil. It appeared to be napping, soaking up the benefits of the indirect sunlight that filtered through the window.
That was just the beginning. Every new plant came with a new designer pot, carefully selected to accent the room. Every interior decision was overruled by the mass of gnomes that found their way into her house and, subsequently, into the pots themselves.
The large pots were fine, but the creatures had begun to unroot the smaller plants completely. It infuriated Shirley – watching them dismantle the plants from their fibreglass plant pots. Melbourne, it seemed, had a gnome problem that she had never been aware of.
Her friends told her to be patient. That the gnomes would move onto a new home soon. Apparently, this was common when first introducing indoor plants into your space. Nobody at the plant nursery had bothered to prepare her for this inevitability, though.
Shirley tried to be patient, but she was sick of getting her feet covered in soil every time she walked through her living room. If these gnomes were determined to stay, she would need to find a way to co-exist alongside them.