Elfin Oak

The Elfin Oak is a gnarled, eight-hundred-year-old oak trunk that was brought to Kensington Gardens from Richmond Park in the late nineteen twenties. The sculptor Ivor Innes spent two years transforming the decaying wood into a woodland fantasy by carving seventy-four miniature figures of elves, gnomes, pixies, and forest animals into the existing nooks and hollows of the bark. He used a technique he called Griglans, which involved scouring the natural, weather-beaten grain of the wood to reveal the shapes of magical creatures he saw hidden within the roots.