web analytics

lol england

Things spotted in back gardens that border footpaths.

This is no random assembly of cement chunks and garden sculpture. Oh, no. This here is art, friends. This is a thing here.

There used to be a house near us with a roof lined by concrete garden animals of one kind or another. They’re gone now. I have a sad feeling it was a house owned by some old coot who is no longer with us.

Hello, Monday. How was your weekend?

Comments


Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: September 16, 2019, 9:28 pm

whut?
No lawn gnome?
No stone cheekin?

No EU flag?
Is that even legal?

Our weekend was simply wonderful. We’re about to become landed gentry in East Texas with 5 acres of carbon offset pine trees!


Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: September 16, 2019, 9:52 pm

My first impression was that they’d found the Pompeii Petting Zoo….


Comment from Armybrat
Time: September 16, 2019, 10:32 pm

I have a fondness for Lampy the garden gnome. My maiden name is Lamport.


Comment from Uncle Al
Time: September 16, 2019, 11:52 pm

The weekend was quiet and quite pleasant, thank you, as was yours ’tis to be hoped.

I do indeed love odd-ball lawn art. That piece with piggies, kitties, and non-functioning fountain cherub is priceless!

Years ago while driving through rural western Pennsylvania, I spotted a phenomenal thing: a few dozen (yes, DOZEN) lawn shrines to the Virgin Mary, all created by burying the lower third of a vertically oriented old claw-foot bathtub with the statue Mary installed within. I’ve never seen the like elsewhere, and they were great! Did I mention that I saw over two dozen of these holy lawn art goodies? And all within about 10 miles of each other.


Comment from Teej
Time: September 17, 2019, 1:34 am

Pompeii petting zoo…
=snort=


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: September 17, 2019, 1:45 am

I love folk art, and I have an odd fondness for bottle trees and old roses.

Re: Uncle Al: I have lived in several predominately Roman Catholic communities, where Virgin Mary shrines are everywhere, including those constructed with bathtubs stuck upright in the ground. In San Antonio, I used to drive by a location where a man built his own Catholic Church. It wasn’t a church overseen by the local diocese, but his own chapel, which was quite handsome and welcoming.

Re: DurnedYankee. Those East Texas pine forests are awesome! Congratulations on your own piece of the woods. Five acres is perfect size.

Though I have to confess: I am a red dirt girl from the Texas panhandle. I am happiest on the windy high plains. I want to see the sun come up, and I want to see the sun go down—without a bunch of trees in the way 🙂 And I’ve been in south Texas for way too long; I haven’t seen a decent night sky in 20 years.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: September 17, 2019, 7:27 am

Those bathtub Marys are all over Rhode Island and Massachusetts. There was one in my old neighborhood, in fact. We used to call them ‘Mary in the halfshell’.

Congratulations, Durned! My mama was a Texan and, like all Texans, wouldn’t shut up about it. So when I was about seven, we took a field trip to visit her old home town (Hackberry, TX…Dallas has swallowed it up now).

Wow. What a shithole.


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: September 17, 2019, 1:38 pm

OMG Weasel – that’s what Mrs D and I call them!

Another piece of lawn art was a tractor trailer truck tire, sliced on the sidewall like a pie, and turned INSIDE OUT.
Then you paint them pretty colors and use it as a planter.

Or the capstan off an old sailing ship just sort of standing by itself in your front yard – again, it helps if you live in coastal New Yankeeland.

We actually are getting 15, but I can only brag on 5 because that’s under “I’m saving the world!” pine (which I had nothing to do with, it’s an agg exemption that lowers the taxes), about 5 more is open hay field, and the other 5 is old hardwood, sweetgum, and oak.

And it comes with a 40 foot railroad boxcar from the 1940s buried in a little grove of hardwoods that Mrs D wants ‘fixed’.

Oh, and wish us a happy – 36 years today!


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: September 17, 2019, 1:56 pm

Oh, Weasel – Hackberry is north of us – it’s surrounded by communities that are all new – if it follows the path, it’ll be a neighborhood we couldn’t afford to buy a 2 car garage in within 5 years.

Frisco, Prosper and the Colony used to be like Hackberry – Frisco now looks like a modern cleaned up version of Dallas. Ironically the people we’re buying the land from were from Frisco when it was a one stop sign “hot tub club” town but they got taxed out of town and went to live back in East Texas where his GF had land.
We’re headed the same way here, so we’re getting a jump on it.
I am amazed in Texas the old movie plot of the locals taxed off their property by the town council (and sheriff) is real, but that’s how it’s going.


Comment from Can't Hark My Cry
Time: September 17, 2019, 2:00 pm

Congratulations, indeed, Durned Yankee! May you enjoy those acres for many combined blissful years!
My folks were from Kilgore and Denton–I have some wonderful childhood memories of visiting, although I don’t think I’d have survived an entire childhood and youth in the heat … 🙁


Comment from Can’t Hark My Cry
Time: September 17, 2019, 6:02 pm

By the way, Stoaty–did I learn about this one from you?
https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/ponyhenge-lincoln-massachusetts/?fbclid=IwAR1MdvReenToFh2GXzAn7bLYltPHFxCpp71YvHry80by4JAB5qiFF7_OCTo

If so, I offer this instead:
http://carhenge.com/?fbclid=IwAR2lmEzwlgRnXiIqWm4t1nW15qNytZFGa-PPgQSkva10JSxsCH3VpSO7JFU


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: September 17, 2019, 11:04 pm

Nope, that’s a new one on me, Can’t Hark. Though I saw many weird and wonderful things geocaching in New England.

I bet there’s a cache at Ponyhenge.

Write a comment

(as if I cared)

(yeah. I'm going to write)

(oooo! you have a website?)


Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.


<< carry me back to ol' virginny