The Blueberry Patch
Dallas Boher's backyard serves as a gallery for recycled art and self-expression
Photo:Danny Ghitis
The gate is open. An American flag flies at the entrance to the backyard, which is marked with the reflective address number 7777. A 3-foot sign sits on the ground welcoming visitors to the Blueberry Patch, Dallas Bohrer’s backyard.
The Patch, occupying about half an acre of land, looks like an organized explosion of art, stuffed animals, signs and recycled materials. Several canopies divide the yard. The first canopy has a wooden electrical cord spool on each side. The spools are flipped on their sides and used as display tables for small potted plants and knickknacks. Another canopy, to the left of the first, shelters a homemade massage bed, combining a table and a foam mattress pad, with a hole cut out for a face rest. A bottle of Purel moisturizing lotion is handy, sitting close to the table.
Dallas and the Patch’s frequent visitors use trash and industry castoffs to create the items that are scattered throughout the backyard. Every Saturday and Sunday, volunteers come to clean up and make new creations. Dallas welcomes strangers and friends to the Patch to escape the rigors of everyday life and retreat into their own fantasy world. “It’s a place to reap and a place to sow, where you’re bound to meet someone you’d like to know,” Dallas says.
A shelter in the middle of the Blueberry Patch serves as a workshop for Billy, an artist, also known as DJ Prophet, who fixes up Dallas’ house in exchange for a place to stay. Billy’s paintings of volcanoes glow under the black lights of the workshop, where techno music plays. He first heard of the Blueberry Patch at a drum circle on the beach. A friend asked him to visit the place, and Billy has been what Dallas calls a “Patch pal” ever since. Billy says the Patch inspires everyone who sees it, from doctors and lawyers to people on the streets.
“It’s an Alice in Wonderland place,” he says, as he walks shirtless and sweating through the yard, with a cloth bandage wrapped around his right hand.
Dallas started the Blueberry Patch, an artists’ haven, on 7/7/77 on a few acres of land in south St. Petersburg. Back in those days the Patch was mainly popular with musicians, artists and students from close-by Eckerd College. After disagreements with the city, stemming from the need to reconstruct a dock on his property, Dallas decided to sell the original home of the Patch. Three moves later, the Patch finally settled in its current location, the artist-friendly community of Gulfport. Dallas says the original location of the Patch is now considered prime property, where million-dollar homes are under construction. “It’s a sad story, but I wouldn’t change anything now,” he says. After all, the Blueberry Patch brings Dallas’ idea of cooperative living, or what he calls “sharevival,” to life. “To survive, we need to give off joy to as many as we can, and this is the place to do it,” he explains.
Upon meeting, Dallas drops seven blue glass beads in my hand, which he calls blueberries. He says that in numerology seven is a very special number because it represents the army. “You need an army to declare peace,” he explains, stringing red and gold ribbon-like confetti over the plants nearby. He shows me a red needlepoint flower an old woman gave him and places it on one of the spools next to the first canopy.
As we chat, sitting on the chairs in the shade of the canopy, a man wearing a baseball cap with the word “Gulfport” on its front approaches.
“Want watermelons today?” he asks Dallas.
“Sure,” he answers, walking back around to the front of his house with the man. When Dallas returns, he’s carrying several paper grocery bags of fresh watermelons.
“Got tomatoes and a cucumber, too,” he says, smiling. “And here’s one for you,” he adds, handing me a watermelon. “This is what it’s all about.”
Dallas wants to show me Blueberry Hill, so we weave past a large trash can shaped like a polka-dotted, soft-serve ice cream cone and up to a small hump between his property and his neighbor Mike’s backyard. He turns to me and asks, “Did you get a thrill on Blueberry Hill?”
The float Dallas and his patch pals used in the Gulfport parade the past four years is parked in the corner of Mike’s backyard. A plastic, bouncy toy rocking horse sits at the front of the float. A grinning dinosaur mask with razor sharp teeth covers its head. A plastic baby Jesus from a nativity scene lays in the front seat, which is painted with red, white and blue stripes. Two of the wise men and the Virgin Mary sit on the float accompanying him. Dallas’ own creation, stars made from aluminum cans, line the bottom of the float. A white porcelain tub occupies the back of the float, where an American flag and a huge peace sign stand. A shark body hangs from a nearby tree. The head of the lamb from the nativity scene pokes out of the body, where the shark’s scary face should be. “It’s the lamb that swallowed a shark,” Dallas says with a laugh.
Mike comes out of his house and offers me a drink. Oliver, another artist who lives with Dallas, walks over and asks me for help proofreading a list of his paintings and their prices. He says I should come back that night for his art show in Mike’s house and for the food his family will bring for the Blueberry Patch’s party.
Walking around the Patch in the daytime may cause a bit of sensory overload. Signs that read “Tis the season to be jolly” hang throughout the yard. A 4-foot iguana made of aluminum cans with compact discs for eyes perches on a tree, while a plush, stuffed Mr. Potato Head doll sticks to another. And that’s only the beginning. At night, hundreds of Christmas and rope lights hang from branches; and on the first, seventh, 11th and 22nd of every month, Dallas opens the Blueberry patch to the public and throws a party that starts at 7:07 p.m. “You have to come back tonight,” Dallas says. So I do.
Entering the yard that night, Mungo Jerry’s song “In the Summertime” plays:
“We’re not grey people, we’re not dirty, we’re not mean,
We love everybody, but we do as we please...
We’re always happy,
Life’s for living that’s our philosophy.”
Passing under the first canopy, visitors drop $3 donations into a fishbowl that rests on a chair. Beyond the table where a blonde woman sells $20 tie-dyed “Blueberry Patch” t-shirts, a group of teenagers cluster in the back left corner of the yard. A long climbing rope hangs from the sturdy branch of a tree. After a girl makes a few unsuccessful attempts to get up the rope, her friend takes his turn. “You can do it,” a man yells. The boy, wearing a red “fitness staff” t-shirt, nimbly climbs the rope, using only his hands at first. He starts to struggle, secures his feet on the rope and makes it to the top, ringing the little brass bell attached to the branch. The crowd around him cheers. “You’re an honorary Patch member now!”
Mike, Dallas’ neighbor and the emcee for his parties, reminds visitors of the Patch’s free keg and food and begins open mike night, calling everyone over to the Blueberry Patch’s theater area. People begin filling the abandoned recliners and couches, which now provide seating in front of the Patch’s stage. The stages’ disco ball reflects bits of light on a white-bearded man, sitting on a blue chair in the second row, holding a wood cane with a gold ornamental top. Behind him, a blond surfer wearing a Billabong shirt lays back on a creaky checkered couch. Incense burns all around the audience, saturating the air, while a cool breeze blows a red-haired mermaid windsock above the stage. A Golden Retriever with a glow stick hanging from its collar weaves between the couches, rubbing against the legs of visitors. Mike begins his set, playing acoustic guitar and bellowing songs like “Mellow Yellow” and an original piece called “Eyebrow Dandruff,” which shares his troubles with skin flakes continually clinging to his eyebrows.
“Gimme some cream, the doctor said no!” Mike sings repeatedly, his voice in crescendo. Mike says he used to have to drink to loosen up before going on stage, but now he enjoys the nervous rush that performing gives him. Before taking a seat, Mike gives a shout out to Billy, or DJ Prophet, who “busts his butt every day of the week, beautifying this place.”
A band that Dallas has never heard before takes the stage. “They’re pretty good,” he says. Although Dallas enjoys creating decorative stars from coke cans, he likes to leave music and art to his Patch pals. “I applaud artists,” he explains. “I’m in charge of applause.”
And that’s just what Dallas does after each song performed on the Patch’s stage, which features a huge portrait of his face with blue rope lights extending from it, like rays of sunshine. Next to the portrait, the word “PARADISE” labels a circular sign depicting a horizon and palm trees.
A woman in a long peasant skirt spots Dallas in the crowd and approaches him. “This place is amazing, thank you,” she says. “It’s amazing someone spends their life making a place like this. I appreciate it.”
“And I appreciate you,” Dallas says.