Down East: housedressing and lawn ornamentation

DOWN

TAKE A RIDE DOWN ANY road in Maine. In among the scenery are all these little stage sets: houses and yards. Plain and simple, or with masses of plantings. Carefully coordinated, or cluttered with bricabrac. Individual artistic expressions, or full of commercially produced imagery. Subtle -- or blatant. What's going on here? Are these scenes consciously planned public statements, or just the manifestations of the urge to decorate? Are these public facades, or glimpses of a private vision?

The placement of details may be clue. Most of this stuff faces the road. Like people, houses have fronts and backs. Some of us are more sensitive about appearances than others, but most of us put up a good front. The message is pride: This is my home. This is my space. There isn't much ornamentation around rental property.

Housedressing is part of our clothing, and the stuff has fashions. Early New England houses were starkly utilitarian. It was sacrilegious to decorate your person or your dwelling. The out-of-doors was a place for work, not idle amusement or contemplation. Gardens were functional, not ornamental. The Puritans weren't into yard art.

Public education cured that. An increasingly literate 19th-century society took to reading travelers' reports o ancient architecture. Style books of European designs were widely read. Popular housing appeared which made an historical statement. Greek Revival facades celebrated ancient democratic ideals and a shared cultural education. Stylized housedressing was media-inspired, by books -- even in the 19th century.

Once you've started decorating the house it's easy to get carried away. By the mid-1800s middle-class houses were decked out in a profusion of cut-board gingerbread. Some of the fancy work was made on site. Most of it was cooked up in a shop somewhere. House builders could even mail-order wooden details. Decorative notions were copied from pattern books, or mass produced. Even so, the finished house was a personal expression of the homeowner's taste.

Hemlines go up and down, and a taste for the simple comes and goes. There was a late-19th-century revolt against the rococo exuberance of Victorian gingerbread. Houses got quieter.

Yards had been absolutely silent -- symbolically. They were organically noisy. Horses stamped in the dooryard. Pigs and chickens poked about. A traditional rural economy isn't into lawns. Maybe a fenced garden for vegetables, for herbs. A shade tree. A Centennial elm in 1876. Lilacs in the dooryard, perhaps. Creeping horticultural ornamentation spread slowly. Bioregional rigors limited the plantings somewhat. Certain hardy species became "traditional." Some were domesticated natives, others imported ornamentals. The desired effect was decorative. Homeowners were out painting in the yard with shrubbery and flowers. Ideas about homes and gardens circulated through the middle class by magazine.

Painting with flowers is impressionistic. It makes a fuzzy picture. Bushes soften the sharp edges of buildings. Flowers intrigue the eye. Housedressing with flora is right out of Renoir.

The rich led the way. Formal gardens and estate landscaping came first, and the suburbs crowded after. Somewhere along the way the lawn was invented. Lawn games require them. Croquet and shuttlecocks and tennis may be responsible for the suburban milieu. In any case, lawns are a 20th-century phenomenon in America, and a celebration of the victory of democracy. A chicken in every pot, and a lawn out front. Everyman can have a pocket-sized estate. An early 20th-century yard might have a trellised arbor, or stone urns. It might have a birdbath, or some other glimpse of the manor, but the message was restrained. It was still kind of sinful to make too loud a display. You could even argue that the decor was useful. Even the Puritans allowed weather vanes. There might be ornamental ironwork, but it was on a lightning rod. Curlicue porch brackets, turned pillars, all that stuff was still safely within the Anglo-Protestant ethic.

Enter the Catholics. Churchy things in the dooryard. A much less inhibited display of personality. Catholic tastes brought new techniques and materials to yard art. Italian stonework. Spanish wrought iron. French-Canadian woodcarving. Mexican pottery. Suddenly the message is full of ethnic traces. Mexican humor. Quebecois eclat. Irish mysticism. German orderliness.

MAINE YARDS TODAY are a tribute to the melting pot. Design details disseminate rapidly. Unpainted cement castings by Italian mold-makers vie with the garish colors of Mexican potters. Whimsical Quebecois whirlygigs and Canadian butterflies are everywhere. Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs abound. Whether the clashing pastels on a house way Down East are Newfoundland Irish or Quebecois French, they make possible bolder housedressing on every home. Even old colonial capes are now splashed with color.

Not every house gets tarted up. There is still class decorum, and naked poverty. Flowers, fortunately, are truly democratic. Even the poorest housewife can nurture a few blooms in a busted tub, or an exploded tire. Mostly, though, yard art is a sign of upward mobility. This is the work of homeowners. People with money to spend for show, and access to cheap industrial products. Most lawn ornaments are mass-produced. This isn't folk art in the sense that these are homemade products of a naive esthetic (although there is a bit of that). This is a folk language, however. It ain't writ down, or media-disseminated. It's face to face. The words may be mass-produced, but the sentences are local-yokel. For all its ethicities, this isn't a foreign language, either. The message is perpectly clear. The images are familiar. In Maine we can probably thank the French for teaching us this style of conversation, but we've all learned the knack.

Lawn ornamentation is an edge phenomenon. It's most outspoken where city meets country. It shouts loud in blue-collar neighborhoods, where industrial wage-work supercedes a traditional rural economy. Perhaps this is because the poor keep a sharp lookout for signs of economic opportunity in the other guy's yard, and the habit carries over into better times. Maybe it's the handyman urge to tinker. For whatever reason, it is along this cultural edge that new words bubble up into the general conversation. Somebody welds up an ornament tree out of an old hayrake. The idea enters the vocabulary, and is put to a variety of uses: plant hangers, buoy hangers, bird-house hangers.

Okay. If this is a language, what is it saying? All kinds of things. Sometimes it's a commercial. Business signs and carved trade figures go way back, and these visual devices found their way into ornamentation. Cut-out imagery and ornamental signing can be strictly business, or funny business.

Sometimes the message is nostalgia, reminiscent of our agricultural heritage. Old wagons. Wheelbarrows. Farm machinery. Milk jugs. Ox yokes.

Some of it honors domesticity. Ducklings. Chisk. Geese. Lambs. Birdhouses, birdhouses, and more birdhouses. Gas grills, lawnchairs, picnic tables, pools -- while nominally utilitarian, all celebrate family life. The family playground, the lawn, is a manicured shrine to middle-class security and domestic bliss. The white-picket-fence syndrome.

The counterpoint between utility and symbolism is a pervasive theme. Take shutters. Once upon a time shutters shut. Then they became cartoons of themselves: vestigial remnants of once-useful forms, turned decorative, and retained out of visual tradition. Shutters became a vehicle for creative self-expression (cut-out silhouettes), a form of industrial decoration (printed animal motifs), and a place for heraldic display (monograms).

There is a thread of animism in this bricabrac. Painted rock creatures appear beside the road, frogs especially. Blasted stumps are carved into totemic figures. Perhaps all the little creatures on our lawns are inspired by an animistic urge. We may have driven away the forest and clipped the grass, but we still salute the mystery of the wild with little cut-outs and statues. Deer and moose. Coons and skunks. Foxes and owls. And there are those spirits of the earth: the gnomes. Celtic mysticism is alive and well on the lawns of Maine.

Gnomes, wishing wells, gazing balls, bird-baths, horseshoes on the wall: all old magic. There are other antique vestiges. Symbolic portals to a private world: arbors and gateposts galore. A pair of anything standing at the entrance to a drive is a magic gateway, from the grandest estate gates to the humblest stones. There are symbolic boundaries: vestigial fences, painted rocks, ornamental rock walls. Magic wards, like hex signs and horseshoes, are mixed in with pure symbolic forms: wheels, wreaths, grindstones and other circles; spheres, crescents, and stars.

The unusual and exotic are honored by displaying found objects: driftwood, old iron, strange stones. People present objects from far away: a Mexican donkey cart or plastic flamingoes. Putting something out-of-context on the lawn may be just in fun. Sometimes the unusual takes on a numinous aura when enshrined on a lawn, however. Conch shells on the front stoop may conjure up a sea-yearning, a mute old bell still speaks.

Lawn Cultch celebrates the modern age, too. Bits of industrial technology find their way onto the lawn. A fascination with windmills shows up all over. One-lunger engines, snowmobiles, satellite dishes, speedboats: sometimes this stuff is useable, other times, it's just decor. And then there are cars. high-gloss antique gazing autos, or rusty old parts cars.

Although anyone can play, there is still an observable class hierarchy. These expressions are used to symbolize an increase in status, and they unmistakably identify the owner's status. Contemporary Upscale tends to bark beds and railroad ties around plantings; dried-flower wreaths, straw brooms, and straw hats on the door; stained cedar clapboards and in-ground pools; subdued coloration and more restrained ornamentation in general. The upwardly mobile lower middle class strains for the manorial effect: big estate gates, all the cement kitsch, quantity over "quality." This is where the deer and the antelope play. There tends to be more fun at the bottom of the scale. More nose-thumbing. No matter how humble, however, the message is "I'm coming up in the world." Real Americana.

A ride down any Maine road gives fair proof that the urge to decorate, to encrust our word with symbolic messages, is almost universal. Correspondence-receptacle ornamentation is just a hint of what's up the drive. To some extent we all dink up the dooryard.

COPYRIGHT 1988 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group