Floral designer is transforming NYC trash cans into giant vases with eye-popping flowers

Floral designer Lewis Miller loves to express himself through flowers and is on a mission to inject a little bit of beauty and color to the streets of New York. Lewis Miller is using flowers to turn garbage cans from an eyesore into larger-than-life flower vases. Lewis Miller is calling them Flower Flashes and they can be seen on some busy streets. Miller's "larger-than-life flower vases" stand out for their bright colors, and innovative designs. Being the owner of Lewis Miller Design, a company that specializes in floral design and decoration, Miller never runs out of flowers. Not to mention, he constantly has leftover flowers from events. Miller and his team use these flowers and bouquets to decorate trash cans. However, the initiative is not limited to just trash cans, with the artist and his team also reimagining statues, sculptures, and other public works of art.

With trashcans and statues often being done in dark or neutral-toned colors such as black and grey, the floral decorations stand out injecting life into the streets of New York. “Gifting flowers to New Yorkers is a simple idea that I have been thinking about for years,” writes Lewis on the Lewis Miller Design website. “I am in the business of fantasy and flowers, and it’s my job to transform key moments in my clients’ lives into joyful, everlasting memories. I wanted to recreate a similar feeling for the everyday city-dwellers and tourists of New York City.” Miller said he always works to evoke an "emotional response through flowers.”

He recently decorated the John Lennon Memorial, a circular mosaic in Central Park. "My desire was to recreate just a sliver of that sentiment and offer it up to the city dwellers and tourists of this great city. So at 5:45 AM, my team and I filled the LMD van with 2,000 flowers and descended on the John Lennon Memorial in Central Park, a circular mosaic resembling a mandala with one word in the center: IMAGINE," he wrote.

His tribute just wasn't to the iconic Beatle but also to the age they lived through. "My team and I created a psychedelic halo of Day-Glo yellow, pink, purple, and orange dahlias, and carnations. So bright and joyful, John and Yoko and every Seventies loving hippie would have approved. By the time the flower installation was complete, dawn had begun to take shape and the curious Parks & Services crew appeared. We all held our breath and wondered if our “Flowers for the People” project was about to live and die in under an hour and the only audience that would have seen it was a squirrel and two early morning joggers. But that was not the case. Outfitted with leaf blowers and a broom, they began to gingerly sweep away the falling leaves around our flowers and gave us their approval and blessing with a quick thumbs-up," he wrote. It's pretty much the response he's been getting from New York City people.

His artwork has become incredibly popular on Instagram with people loving posing next to decorated statues and public works of art. "In this age of social media, we saw the fruits of our labor and were instantly rewarded via Instagram! We got to see how our idea translated in real-time with hundreds of selfies and photographs documenting the flowers throughout the course of the day. It was one of the most rewarding and gratifying “events," said Miller. You can follow his work on Instagram.