Thousand: Three Hundred Eighteen

to apply it to things that needed to grow far from the literal garden. What was the garden gnome to grow? A characteristic, one already well rooted in man but which the gnome’s employer wished to see burgeon like a vine, curling around and clinging, to grow stout like a tree trunk, impassive, inflexible, to grow leafy like a bush, every spot the sun reaches for reaching back, to blossom, heady aroma that banishes sense, to fruit. Obedience. The gnome had been hired to coax obedience from its present hardy but weedy natural state to a commercial form, a reliable