Saturday, January 10, 2009

Front Lawn Folk Art: A Dayton Thang

The city has that "orginals wanted" branding campaign. And you can find some grassroots originals on the backstreets of the city.

There's a little tendancy to turn a front yard (sometimes a side yard) into a folk art work, with various features, sometimes including flowers, sometimes not.

Heres' one spotted on Huffman about a block east of Smithville, in the Eastern Hills neighborhood:


A close-up:


Sure, this isn't "correct" landscaping but its sure fun to look at. You won't spot these on a drive-through. To really get the detail requires a walk by. I've happened across a few during my years of snapshooting in the city, but don't have many online yet. One could actually do a fairly decent pix post on these, or even a small picture book.

One of those obscure things folk don't notice but makes Dayton just a bit "different".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We have lots of people in our area (Farmersvill/Germantown) who LOVE their lawn art. Here's a photo from one house that decided to cut back - http://2thebacon.blogspot.com/2008/07/tis-season.html

Anonymous said...

I'm quite fond of yard art- it simply makes me giggle.

I have a funny little book called Garish Gardens, http://www.amazon.com/Garish-Gardens-Outlandish-Lawns-Ronald/dp/1572231408
It quotes Donald Featherstone, the man who created plastic pink flamingos: "Before plastics, only rich people could afford to have poor taste."

yup.