Goodbye gas station, hello Gnome Man's Land: 8 metre-high Howard has found a new home
After weeks of uncertainty, Howard is officially safe.
The 7.91 metre-high gnome had been teetering on the edge of destruction. His owners at a Nanoose Bay, B.C., gas station said earlier this month that he was in disrepair and they would need to tear him down if he didn't find a new home.
Saanich farmer Rob Galey quickly stepped up and offered to take in the homeless colossus, thought to be the biggest of his kind in the world.
"When I finally heard that Howard was going to be put up for adoption, I applied right away," Galey told CBC.
His family business, Galey Farms, already features several theme areas, including dinosaurs, a Western town and an Addams Family graveyard.
"It's just a vision of mine to build 'Gnome Man's Land,'" Galey explained.
Fortuitously, resident sculptor David Gray had already constructed some gigantic, fantasy-land toadstools.
"We're like, 'Wow, these would totally suit Howard.' And we've had other thoughts — we would build some flying oversized dragonflies and hummingbirds, and just make it a really natural garden scene here at the farm," Galey said.
A homecoming
This will be a homecoming of sorts for Howard. The gnome was built by Ron Hale in 1998 to promote his family's amusement park, which was also called Gnome Man's Land.
When the park was torn down a few years later, the family opened a gas station on the property, where Howard still held a place of honour. He stayed when the family sold the property, but today he's covered in moss, partially held together with rope and his platform has rotted.
The Galey Farms team plans to restore Howard on site, and they hope to get much of the work finished before the day-to-day work of springtime farming takes over their days. Their goal is to have the gnome installed in his new fantasy world by the fall.
"The way I look at Howard, it would be like a car restoration. We need to get him apart, we need to go inside, we need to see how the framework is. We don't know what rust or anything's on the inside, so of course we'd have to structurally make him safe," Galey said.
He hasn't figured out exactly where Howard will stand, but he wants the gnome to be somewhere he can be seen from the farm's train, so that people with mobility issues won't miss the new attraction.
