Mowing a lawn can be a monotonous task, especially in the heat.
But if your 25-year-old Joshua Perry, mowing is a form of art.
Perry has spent the last four years mowing creative designs into baseball fields all around the country. Not too shabby for a guy who majored in business management and spent most of his childhood and college career on the field actually playing.
“Never thought this is where I would end up but I wouldn’t change a thing,” Perry told the Daily Dot in an interview. “Most coaches don’t really talk about patterns they just will say the field is playing nice or just ask you how it’s going. So far no complaints.”
Perry has mowed designs at Dow Diamond in Michigan, the Reds Spring training facility in Phoenix and Boston’s Fenway Park. Depending on the intricacy of the designs, a design can take anywhere from one to four hours. From far away the designs look like large green quilts full of criss-crossed lines and zig-zags. In an year-end Reddit IAmA (I am a) Perry explained how he created them.
Basically the patterns just consist of the direction the grass has been mowed most recently. Our mowers have rollers in front of and behind the actually mowing reel which lays the grass down in what ever direction we are mowing. So any dark line you see is a line of grass that was mowed towards the viewer, and any light line of grass you see was mowed going away from the viewer. In order to get diamonds you need to mower 2 directions, like east and west, followed by another pass of north and south lines. On an infield you would make a pass down the first baseline on the edge of the grass and continue to go back and forth following those lines across the infield then do another round of passes following the third baseline across the infield, in my first picture in the link you see large squares in the outfield, that involved me going away from the viewer for the small line and towards the viewer for 3 passes for the big line then away again, doing this 2 directions for the entire outfield.
On game days, Perry and the field crew work from from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., mowing the fields, maintaining the bull pen, watering the dirt and chalking the lines. On Thursday Perry submitted photos of his lawn designs to Reddit where they reached the front page with more than 750 comments praising his creativity. Redditors even gave Perry the pun thread treatment.
“Reddit is amazing,” Perry said. “ I told a coworker who is a redditor we should do an iama and he was like, ‘I dunno,’ so I threw up the pictures to see the response and it was huge. I was overwhelmed.”
Here are some photos of Perry’s work.
All images provided by Joshua Perry