Shilo Preston-Stanley – the face behind Kambah’s mysterious Gnomvember garden. Photo: James Coleman.
Every day, they’re doing something different.
Just this past week, the gnomes at the ‘Five Ways Garden’ in Kambah have been practising farming, dance moves, working out and trick-or-treating.
What most passers-by won’t see is Shilo Preston-Stanley, painstakingly setting up all the gnomes – in their various poses and outfits – from 5 am every morning during November.
Or, as she dubs, ‘Gnomvember’.
The gnomes have been busy gardening this week. Photo: Shilo Preston-Stanley.
For the six Novembers since 2020, Shilo takes time out of her day to bring her burgeoning collection of garden gnomes and tiny props over to the garden on Bissenberger Crescent, Kambah, and set them up.
And she never seems to run out of new ideas.
“It is all go in the garden today! The gnomes returned to a bit of overgrowth and some weeds, so they are getting in and tidying the garden,” she posted to the dedicated Gnomvember Facebook page on 5 November.
Farm life was another of this week’s themes. Photo: Shilo Preston-Stanley.
A few days earlier, the gnomes were “visiting the world’s smallest farm”.
“They have found lots of animals and are learning all about them,” another post read.
It all began when her son told her about how one of his friends had a gnome that lived in her garden and gave her presents.
“He asked if our gnome did that, and I said, ‘Why don’t you ask him?’,” Shilo told Region.
“So he wrote a letter to the gnome, and it ‘wrote’ back. That’s how it started, but I couldn’t keep up with all the time, so I told him they only come to life in November.”
She first brought them to Five Ways in 2020, a community garden established by a resident in the 1980s to protect the nature strip trees from damage caused by lawnmowers.
In 2023, however, a passing government ranger ordered its removal, claiming it had not been approved, kickstarting a fierce campaign by locals to save it. City Services minister Chris Steel had to intervene and confirm the ACT Government “has never had plans to remove this fantastic community garden”.
The garden is still booming with plants and visitors in 2025, and Shilo agreed, “It is all good to remain”.
The Five Ways garden is located about halfway along Bissenberger Crescent, Kambah. Photo: James Coleman.
Her daughter, Nia Cornthwaite, has come up with most of the gnomes’ names, along with a different backstory for each one.
For instance, Stan Scribble is a poet and calligrapher who enjoys collecting vintage quills and ink pots; Enfys ‘Rainbow’ Stormweather is a professor “committed to reviving and sharing her love of the Welsh language”; and Granola Fabiola is a horticulturist specialising in grains who “also enjoys opera and is a talented soprano”.
While she’s long gone by then, neighbours have counted as many as 50 kids stopping past the garden before or after school to see what the gnomes are doing each day.
And while she expects they’ll “move around”, she’s yet to have one go missing.
“I kind of hoped they’d all be stolen in the first year, so I didn’t have to do it again. But mostly people don’t touch them.”
They’ve also travelled to other locations in Kambah, such as outside the Little Blue Rock store on Carleton Street, or even as far as the metal sheep sculptures outside the Kambah Village shopping centre off Drakeford Drive.
“Again, I thought people would take them from the public spaces, but they didn’t.”
A mini chalkboard explains what the gnomes are doing each day. Photo: James Coleman.
It turns out the gnomes’ own gardening efforts this week were, in fact, advertising for an upcoming working bee in the Five Ways Garden.
During the rest of the year, the garden is primarily maintained by two locals – planting, weeding and landscaping by themselves – which Shilo says is “a lot of work”.
She’s asking people with shovels or weeding tools to head to the Bissenberger Crescent from 10 am to 12 pm on Saturday, 15 November, to “help the gnomes and local humans tidy the garden”.
You can follow the gnome’s movements on the Gnomvember Facebook group.
