The image itself is familiar enough: a green lawn with pink flamingos on it.

Don Featherstone: Pink Flamingo

This sculpture was created in 1957 by the American artist Don Featherstone as part of his work for Union Products, an injection mould plastics company. All those three-dimensional plastic things you see on lawns (Halloween cauldrons, plastic pumpkins, and even nativity sets) were sold by this company. Featherstone designed some 750 different products, starting with a boy with a dog and a girl with a watering can; he also sculpted animals to animals. One of those animals was the pink flamingo, which hit the market in 1958 at the height of the pink craze. They came originally in 2 poses: standing and feeding, and third model, flying (with propeller wings) was added later.

Feeding and standing pink flamingos

Flying pink flamingos

In some areas of the US, the pink flamingo lawn ornament became a symbol of design. Featherstone himself had 57 in his yard, commemorating the year he created the first one, named Eventually, however, it became a symbol of kitsch and bad taste, as has happened to so many of the post-war products. It has periodic resurgences as the taste for the 1950s ebbs and flows. Currently, as a political statement, some people are putting blue flamingos on their lawns to show support for the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, if their town forbids political lawn signs.

Blue Flamingos

A memory of the iconic pink flamingo was an inspiration for American composer Michael Daugherty. Commissioned by the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio, and Trinity Chamber Orchestra, Cleveland, Ohio, for a work for chamber orchestra, he wrote Flamingo (1991).

He thought back to a car trip his family took in 1962 from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Miami, Florida. As the family travelled further south, the new pink lawn ornaments became a familiar sight along the road. A stop in Winter Haven, Florida, and the water park at Cypress Gardens, known for its water ski show, provided more inspiration.

Cypress Gardens’ Water Skiers

There, the composer saw real flamingos for the first time, walking with their heads extended, heads turning left and right, and talking continuously.

Real Flamingos

In his music, Daugherty has two tambourine soloists standing on each side of the stage. The piccolo starts the staccato rhythm that will, eventually, work its way through the whole chamber orchestra. The tambourines play slightly out-of-sync canons with the chamber orchestra.

A sombre middle section was another event that happened in 1962, an announcement on the car radio that ‘Marilyn Monroe had mysteriously died in Hollywood’.

At the close, the whole ensemble builds to create something ‘reminiscent of a pyramid of show water skiers skimming the water’s surface at breakneck speed’. The idea of flamenco and flamingo get intertwined, especially with the unique use of the tambourines, where they are not only shaken but hit, rattled and rolled (with the thumb).

Pyramid of Water Skiers at Cypress Gardens

It’s an interesting way to memorialise an event from one’s childhood. Travelling with his parents and three brothers, the eight-year-old future composer clearly found much to remember 30 years later.

Although the Union Products company, founded in 1936, closed its doors in 2006, its moulds and designs were sold to another injection moulding company, and the pink flamingo (and so much else) lives on. The original Cypress Gardens, founded in 1936, closed its doors and retired its water skiers in 2003; its botanical garden is now part of the new Legoland Florida.

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