Turning Yards, Patios Into Pricey Outdoor Rooms
Talk about your frog prince.
A 1930s green and copper-tone Weller Pottery toad with a propeller sprinkler atop its head recently sold at an Ohio auction for $5,500.
Five-and-a-half grand for a piece of old lawn-watering equipment, complete with hose?
“He was adorable,” cooed Terry Kovel, who with her husband, Ralph, has written the annual Kovels’ Antiques & Collectibles Price List for more than three decades.
In recent years, they have watched the prices of vintage garden tools and accessories climb steadily. The accouterments are part of a larger trend, said Terry Kovel, because “gardening has become so much bigger. Look at all the television shows and books coming out. Husbands are now into gardening, and when men get into the collecting field, they spend more money than women. A few years ago, only the English had auctions and catalogs for garden antiques and collectibles.”
While the anonymous buyer of this particular four-figure amphibian was more interested in owning a rare piece of Weller Pottery than a gardening antique, auctioneer Michael DeFina--who presided over the spirited four-way bidding for it in Austinburg, Ohio--said there is definitely a “funny niche” of sprinkler collectors.
Last year on EBay, a cast-iron lawn-watering frog went for $2,000, said Fort Worth lawyer and collector Richard Tucker. His personal assortment of 15 figural sprinklers includes an alligator, a turtle, two ducks and a cardinal perched on a branch.
Sotheby’s, the venerable auction house that has long put fine antique lawn furniture and huge urns on the block, sold a $700 irrigating ducky in 1997.
But sprinklers are not the only hot garden collectibles these days. Watering cans, hose nozzles, flower “frogs,” bug sprayers and other such prosaic implements are also shooting up in value, experts say.
In Los Angeles, antique garden tools and accessories also are commanding hefty prices. Large 19th century French terra cotta jardinieres sell between $5,500 to $6,500 at the Wallach Elmo Dorsey Antiques store in West Hollywood. Nineteenth Century cast-iron urns from France which were originally used as decorations in the garden go for about $2,500.
“Things were made to last a lifetime. They outlasted their owners,” says Darrell Dorsey, a partner at the store. “The interest now is wanting something of enduring quality and craftsmanship as well as being wonderful for what they do as tools.”
Some people consider gardens, patios, porches and other outdoor spaces worthy of the same level of decoration as the interior spaces of their well-appointed homes, says Allan Davis, owner of Yard Art in San Francisco, which sells outdoor antiques and collectibles.
“Today at flea markets, vendors want $45 for a watering can that is not even functional. If I found a wonderful one with great old paint, I would buy it,” said Davis, who stocks a $6,500 antique granite Japanese lantern alongside a $45 three-pronged pitchfork. “It’s just beautiful,” he said of the pitchfork. “I paid $35 for it and marked it $45 because people aren’t willing to pay much for something they can find in a barn.”
Collectors who cannot afford antique lawn furniture or huge urns from an 18th century European villa or formal Asian garden still want unusual and decorative objects, said Harry L. Rinker, author of the Harry L. Rinker Official Price Guide to Collectibles. “The name of the game today is that things are very eclectic. What interests you should display well.”
For him, that means vintage push lawn mowers and DDT delivery systems. “I have a number of bug sprayers on a shelf in my living room. I paid between $15 and $30 for them. Most are made of printed tin, and they are in excellent condition.”
Nancy Grimes, owner of New England Garden Ornaments in North Brookfield, Mass., has a passion for flower frogs--finely crafted metal, glass or pottery bases whose openings hold blooms upright.
“I have a lot. They are round, square. I have two beautiful Art Deco ladies,” said Grimes. “Flower frogs were hot in New York 15 years ago, so prices are no longer low. I’ve never found pretty ones inexpensively. I’ve paid between $20 and a couple of hundred dollars. Every really fine pottery--like Weller and Roseville--made frogs to go into their vases and bowls.”
There are currently 13 pages of “garden antiques” on EBay (including some items that look suspiciously new). The old stuff includes wagon wheels; a rusty, three-arm Victorian plant stand; a corroded scythe; assorted sprinklers and nozzles; rose dusters; and cast-stone lawn jockey on a pedestal.
“There is quite a demand for all this,” said Moki Heston, owner of Moss & Co. in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., an outdoor-indoor accessories shop. “Most of my clients want big old rusty urns, antique watering cans, sometimes fence edging and definitely old finials. And then there are the old-lawn-sprinkler collectors.”
The increasingly popular sentimental journey to gardens of yore does not please Mary Randolph Carter, author of “Garden Junk,” a 1997 photo book celebrating all manner of decaying horticultural artifacts and lawn furniture.
Gone are the days when funky hose caddies and porch chairs could be bought for a song, lamented Carter. “I was just looking in Country Living magazine, and they had a whole gardeners’ antiques guide with all these tips on how to find this stuff, how to display it. What drives the desire to collect it all is that in this perfect world of Gaps and Pottery Barns, one yearns for the imperfect. That’s certainly the case with me.”
Kovel, too, prefers old to new in the Cleveland suburb she calls home. “In our area, those big cement geese, some wearing dresses, are big, which is sillier than anything else I’ve seen. I actually just bought an old brass nozzle because it works better than the new ones.”
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Times staff writer Candace A. Wedlan contributed to this report.
