In Defense of the Plastic Bird

Don Featherstone molded a flamingo for a lawn in 1957, and somehow it has outlasted every tasteful thing planted beside it.

The first one arrived in a flat cardboard box, two halves of a bird and a pair of metal legs you snapped on yourself. My grandmother staked hers into the clipped grass beside the mailbox in a town outside Leominster, and the neighbors complained for a week before quietly ordering their own.

Why the green matters more than the pink

Everyone remembers the hot pink, but the design only works because of the ground it stands in. Against mowed mid-century lawn green, that glossy molded plastic reads as pure invention — a bird that was never meant to migrate anywhere except from one suburban yard to the next.

"Good taste is what you buy. Kitsch is what refuses to leave."