A while back we discovered two Americans who mowed and painted the logo for their favourite baseball team into their lawns as a show of support for the team during tense qualification periods. It seems large-scale lawn art is a big thing across the pond, as the groundskeeper at Shafer Wineries in the Napa Valley, California, has been proving for the past few years.
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Uriel Osorio has worked for Shafer since 2008, and divides his time between cellar work and keeping the grounds tidy. His daughter, who loves coming in to work with him, inspired him to mow a heart shape into the front lawn back in 2010, and the grassy art was such a hit he was inspired to keep coming up with new designs for the front lawn.
Osorio uses a lawn mower to create his ‘grassterpieces’, with some technical help from Alexa, his daughter, who worked out a way to mow star shapes for the American flag. The creations are done over the weekends when no other employees are around to witness the magic in action, so the rumour around Shafer is that Osorio has a font attachment for the front of his lawn mower, so accurate is his lettering. Osorio is surprised at how well the designs have gone down, admitting that he showed no artistic talent at school.
Over the years Osorio has stepped up the creativity, mowing the Shafer logo in a faithful recreation of the company font, and even tailoring the lawn mower art to special occasions such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, for which he created a giant turkey and Santa respectively. Halloween is another holiday that Osorio likes to create art for, in the form of pumpkins and witches. For the 90th birthday of founder John Shafer he created an image of a B-24 bomber, which Shafer had flown in the Second World War. Osorio’s homage accurately depicted the tail configuration and engines of the original B-24, with a twist; instead of dropping bombs, the plane was shown dropping bottles of cabernet.
Most of Osorio’s lawn mower art can be found on the Shafer Facebook page, where they now upload every iteration of their front lawn art gallery.
36 year-old Chad Morgan Ellcey is not a lawn mower artist; his creation on a neighbour’s lawn landed him in jail in December last year after he did doughnuts on a high power riding lawn mower. The son of the property owner challenged Ellcey after seeing the damage he was doing to his father’s lawn, and Ellcey responded by threatening the man with a large metal pipe. Police were called and arrested habitual felon Ellcey, who had previous convictions for driving while suspended and resisting arrest among others. We don’t think Ellcey will be pursuing a career in lawn mower art on his release.
If you fancy trying your hand at some lawn mower art in your own garden (following the Uriel Osorio school rather than Ellcey’s interpretation) then The Art of the Lawn: Mowing Patterns to Make Your Neighbours Green With Envy by David Parfitt is the book for you. It contains 15 designs with instructions that are easy to recreate with a lawn mower and some string, working up from a simple chequerboard to Christmas trees and eagles. If you or a family member really loves mowing the lawn then this is a perfect birthday (or Father’s Day) gift and will surely make the neighbours envious of your beautifully manicured lawn. Just be careful not to do too good a job, or you may find that the whole street starts asking you to artfully mow their lawns as well.