Into the Woods With the Dix Park Trolls

The artist Thomas Dambo sat under the oak tree at Dix Park for easily half an hour, gazing at the Raleigh skyline.

The father troll, Daddy Bird Eye, would go here, he decided, where he could keep watch over the family. Mother Strongtail would lie on her side in the forest about three-quarters of a mile away, her 620-foot tail trailing through the trees, its tip held by Dix, the baby troll, who now stands at the edge of the woods gazing across Flowers Field. The tail will serve as a curving boardwalk for adventurous visitors to explore deeper into the woods.

Dambo, 46, a Danish artist who works almost entirely with recycled materials, brought his team to North Carolina in October to build the largest statewide collection of his trolls anywhere in the United States, with five at Dix Park and one each in High Point and Charlotte. There is also a traveling exhibit opening in November at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, part of the region’s push to revive tourism in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. There are currently 139 trolls across 19 states.

Before Dambo became world-renowned for his troll sculptures, during years working as a hip hop performer and a street artist, he worked in a factory in Denmark that had a mountain of scrap wood out back. 

“Always, a garbage truck would come and drive away—and I was like, this could become something beautiful!” he says. “This mountain represents trees in forests standing all around the world, where these products that sat on those pallets were produced, and I got the thought that it could be cool if I could create an army of trolls with the message to protect those forests and place them in those forests around the world.”

Dambo’s captivation with trolls began as a child, when he’d check out library cassette tapes about Den Søde Lille Trold, or The Cute Little Troll. That troll, which lived in the forest protecting all of the animals, lived on in his head and eventually evolved into 171 giant troll sculptures in 23 countries around the globe, each with its own story of saving the world. Dambo’s trolls are cuter and friendlier than the malevolent trolls of Scandinavian mythology, but the Norse tradition of trolls protecting the forest goes back centuries. 

Dambo’s motto for life and work: Waste No More. Thus, the food onsite during the three-week build is vegetarian, served on compostable plates.

As he speaks, he interrupts his stride across the field to scoop up a random piece of litter. Then another. For the Dix Park event introducing the trolls, he eschews chairs set up in a field and insists instead on the gathered standing in the forest, the sound of power tools and children’s laughter in the background.

Each troll installation is a meld of topography and recycled construction materials, and a story. The Dix Park trolls are a family—a mother and father and three mischievous younglings—all intent on protecting the symbolic Grandmother tree from destructive humans.

As Dambo says in a poem he wrote to introduce the trolls, “One species all trolls have learned to fear through evolution, invasive, a pollution, you must never trust a human.” The trolls’ necklaces provide clues to Dambo’s story of how they have cast a spell on the grandmother tree to make it look no different from all of the others, since “a human seeks the oldest trees, to kill and cut them down, and chop it into tiny pieces, haul it, burn it in their town.”

When Dix Park Conservatory put out a request for volunteers to help build the trolls, the website crashed, so many were eager to help build the magic. Many of their shifts begin with Dambo reciting one of his poems, stories told in iambic pentameter, before he leads his workers back into the woods.

Dambo and his team craft the trolls’ faces back at their workshop in Denmark, somehow projecting compassion, kindness, and impishness with flat planes and sharp angles. The irises are left out of the eyes until the trolls are complete. Installing them is the final touch that brings each troll to life. At Dix, their bodies are built of donated barn wood and fencing, former pallets, and 15 tons of used bourbon barrel staves, black with char and redolent of whiskey.

Over three weeks, 336 volunteers swarm the site, sawing and screwing the barrel bits to create the mama troll’s tail, each bite of the jigsaw releasing the rich bouquet of Kentucky bourbon. Other workers gather twigs and branches that are turned into troll hair, while Dambo’s team of “professional troll builders”—he says this with a twist of humor—craft the structures that sit behind the volunteer-built cladding, turning disparate scraps into the image in Dambo’s mind.

The works are not precise; most of the builders are not professionals. Dambo is comfortable with this asymmetry.

“For me, perfect detail weighs less heavy than mass inclusion,” he said, “and I try to design my sculpture to welcome all skills.” 

The tail, he thought, would be a perfect way to invite community involvement. It’s low to the ground and forgiving of mistakes. No need to put volunteers in danger on scaffolding while still giving them the magical experience of building a troll and knowing that children and families will feel glee and delight discovering something they helped bring to life.

Dambo and his trolls were invited to Dix Park by Kate Pearce, executive director of Dix Park, and Nick Smith, chief of staff of Dix Park Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to developing the park. Dambo was drawn not just by the rolling hills and patches of forest, but by the history of the land. “I love the story of how this used to be a hospital and now it has been revitalized to be something else,” he said, “and I like to be part of this mission.”

It is all of a piece: Recycled materials on recycled land.

Pearce follows up. “This land is a place of reinvention, of restoration, a transition from native American hunting ground, to a plantation with an enslaved workforce, to the state’s first mental health hospital, to now what we hope will be the most amazing urban park in America. So this idea of transition and transformation and reuse of material—that vision and ethos plays into everything Dix Park is.”

The trolls are spread around the 308-acre park. Walking among them takes about an hour, and that hike is part of Dambo’s goal. “My art is about getting people off of their screens and getting children out to experience all that magic that I experienced growing up, like searching in the forest,” he said. “I’m always imagining my own kids going on that hike. It’s easy to be motivated if you’re going to see trolls!”

Dix Park Conservancy won’t reveal how much it cost to bring the trolls to Raleigh. Other communities have seen a huge return on their investment, though. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens got its five trolls in 2021, and visitation to the gardens has since jumped by two-thirds, from just over 204,000 people in 2020 to more than 331,000 in 2025. Membership in the gardens rose from 5,970 families in 2020 to 7,645 in 2025. 

“Troll tourism is a real thing,” says Hey. “People are traveling around the country to see these.”

In tiny Detroit Lakes, Minnesota—population 10,000—their five trolls have brought in 75,000 to 100,000 visitors a year since they were unveiled in June of 2024, says Amy Stearns, executive director of Project 412, the local nonprofit that spearheaded efforts to bring the trolls to town. And while lodging was down throughout the state last year, hotels in tiny Detroit Lakes have stayed full, with bus tours coming up from Minneapolis and visitors trickling in from around the world.

She describes Dambo as “just a giant fabulous kid, full of energy and delight.” He’d run to a tree and strike a pose, saying, ‘What if there were a troll right here peeking around it?’ 

At Dix, the trolls are now in place, guarding the grandmother tree, delighting families, and enticing more and more people to explore. You can find the winsome trolls frolicking throughout the park, wielding their magic both to protect their beloved forest and to delight visitors with their magical whimsy.

An earlier version of this story contained an error. The correct spelling of Kate Pearce’s name is Pearce, not Pierce.

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