The Dutch artist’s “The Grandmother Tree” includes seven trolls across North Carolina, making this the largest of his permanent installations in the United States
by Ayn-Monique Klahre

At the edge of the woods, the troll peeks out: a baby by the standards of her kind, but at over 12 feet tall, she’s giant to most of us humans. In one hand, she’s holding onto her mother’s tail, which winds deep into the trees — all the way to the hidden spot where Mom sleeps. This baby troll’s siblings have gone further afield to play, and their father is foraging nearby.

These trolls are not alive, of course, but a multifigure sculpture called The Grandmother Tree from Danish artist Thomas Dambo within Dorothea Dix Park. Dix Park now has five of these trolls, and with two additional trolls in downtown High Point and The River District in Charlotte, this is now the largest permanent installation of Dambo’s trolls in the United States.

The idea to bring the trolls to North Carolina came when Dix Park Conservancy Art Task Force chair Marjorie Hodges and her husband, Carlton Midyette, visited the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine. There, they came across a Dambo troll installation called Guardians of the Seeds. “It took us 30 seconds to say, we need these for the park,” says Midyette. He worked with philanthropist Tom Gipson to lead a campaign to finance a project of the same scale for Dix Park.

Part of what attracted Dambo to this project was the 308-acre park’s history. “I love how this park used to be something else,” he says. Agrees Kate Pearce, executive director of Dix Park for the City of Raleigh: “It’s a land of reinvention and restoration.”

For each of his installations, Dambo crafts a narrative with the trolls’ backstory. In his telling, the North Carolina trolls are all protecting the Grandmother Tree, the oldest and wisest tree in the forest, who is hidden in another forest in the area, disguised as a regular tree.

The Raleigh trolls came together through a robust community effort. Dambo and his team of professional troll-makers designed the creatures and built the frames, and Habitat for Humanity Wake County used a mix of their staff, skilled volunteers and a wider volunteer effort to do the rest. “We rotated our entire construction staff to work on the project,” says Patricia Burch, CEO of Habitat Wake. “It was so cool to have a hand in building them.” When they opened the signup to community volunteers, there was so much interest that the server crashed.

In addition to receiving donated materials from Habitat Wake and its ReStores, Dix Park enlisted furniture maker Raleigh Reclaimed, owned by Billy Keck and Melody Ray, to help source rot-resistant woods like cedar, oak and locust for the project. “We had a built-in process for collecting these materials,” says Ray.

“It just made sense to partner on the project.” Kentucky Bourbon Barrel chipped in 17 tons of old bourbon barrels (most of which went into making the mama troll’s 620-foot tail), and Midyette donated the remains of a fallen-down barn and about a mile of old fencing he had on his property. In the end, it took about 400 volunteers, 24 tons of lumber, 50,000 screws and three weeks to build the Dix Park trolls (not including work Dambo and team had done in Denmark 

Dambo hopes the trolls inspire a sense of wonder for Dix Park visitors. “It’s about bringing magic back into spaces,” says Pearce.

This article originally appeared in the December, 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.