Sprouting up alongside the streets of New York City, garbage cans packed with colorful flowers are turning repelled waste receptacles into attractive centers of attention for garbage-weary pedestrians.

Floral designer Lewis Miller has been turning heads — passersby are quite literally stopping to smell the roses (and other plants) appearing in his carefully arranged bouquets, each unique and site-specific.

His ongoing project takes empty bins and uses them as blank canvasses, creating botanical art through sunflowers, azaleas, and other more exotic species. Something about the juxtaposition with beat-up wire-mesh containers makes them all the more stunning, too.

“We are storytellers through the art of floral design, transforming an arrangement into a love song and an event into an indelible experience,” says the artist. Different arrangements also pick up patterns and colors from their context, be it stickers, signs, architecture or other street art.

The temporary installations may not be a permanent solution for bad-smelling trash in a city well known for its street-side waste, but at least they offer a colorful (if passing) reprieve from the normal contents of these containers.

Just like the dull rocks that often reveal geode formations in nature, one would not expect to find such a sweet surprise inside what look a bit like giant Easter eggs (or perhaps dinosaur droppings).

As a final thesis project for the Culinary Institute of America in New York, Alex Yeatts and Abby Lee Wilcox spent months crafting these monstrous treats.

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Orange-red and purple crystals inside look remarkably natural, particularly the latter (resembling typical amethysts). While hardly healthy, one could imagine subsisting on these gigantic desserts indefinitely.

In a similar vein (treats imitating nature), the “flower cakes” (and cupcakes) of Iven Kawi are stunning works of culinary art, so lifelike one could imagine being pricked by the needles on cacti or grind one’s teeth on the sandy landscapes (via Colossal).

Bought at auction by a florist last year, this dilapidated multifamily home was destined to be demolished but given a last chance to blossom thanks to a team of florists and array of volunteers packing the place inside and out with a flowers.

Deserted houses in Detroit are famously sold for as little as a dollar by the city, giving florist  Lisa Waud (photos by Heather Saunders) an idea.

She purchased this place for just $250 at auction, then turned a trash-filled abandonment into a work of art as well as a fundraiser for a flower farm and design center on the site.

The Flower House was given over to contributing florists, each encouraged to turn a space, wall or ceiling into a blank canvas for their creations. The results are remarkable.

Following the project, “the house that held the exhibition will be responsibly deconstructed and its materials repurposed. the land will be converted into a flower farm and design center on their formerly neglected properties.”

Combining a Japanese floral arrangement tradition (ikebana) with the hunting convention of mounted trophies, these plant holders allow for clever, colorful and ever-changing organic displays.

The Elkebana consists of a pair of glass flower holders set into a familiar wooden wall plaque, designed by Fabio Milito & Paula Studio and hand-crafted in Italy.

Its creators have had quite a bit of fun naming some of their experimental arrangements, including Nora the Angora, Girgenta the Goat, Jason the Aries, Isidoro the Oryx and Frank the Buck.

Unlike the more morbid mounts that inspired this creation, there is also a greater degree of flexibility – change the flowers or their organization and you change the piece.

And unlike traditional tabletop vessels for botanical displays, this one works well for small living spaces where surface area cannot be sacrificed.

Made of high quality birch plywood, solid walnut, solid oak or cork shield, the wall mounts hold your botanical arrangements in the two hand-blown glass vases.

From its makers: “The ‘ikebana is the ancient Japanese art of arranging floral elements in harmonious compositions. Elkebana brings the ancient art of ikebana to the wall, in order to transform the wall trophy idea into a continuously mutating, colourful creature.”

Responding to the movements of visitors passing through the space, this immersive work of installation art puts you in a private bubble in the midst of dense hanging garden – except this remarkable bubble that moves with you.

The Floating Flower Garden by TeamLab, a Japanese art collective, is on display in Tokyo, having been extended due to popular demand. Suspended from above, the plants are pulled up or dropped down to both envelop visitors but also given them hemispheres of personal space amid the floating foliage.

The idea is to make each guest part of the installation, allowing them to separate from friends and experience it alone or to move in groups and see how the computer system responds in realtime.

Meanwhile, the digital setup is not the only piece that changes things over time: “these flowers are alive and growing with each passing day. Each flower has a partner insect and the scent of the flowers becomes stronger at the time that the insect is most active, as a result the scent of the air in the garden space changes according to the time of day, morning, noon, and evening.”

TeamLab believes technology elevates art, but their work also places into pre-modern knowledge and ancient ideas of spatial awareness originating in Japanese philosophy and religion, including Zen gardens. More from the artists: “When a viewer gets close to this flower-filled space, the flowers close to the viewer rise upwards all at once, creating a hemispherical space with the viewer at its center.”

“In other words, although the whole space is filled with flowers, a hemispherical space is constantly being created with the viewer at its center and the viewer is free to move around wherever they want. If many viewers get close to one another, the dome spaces link up to form one single space. In this interactive floating flower garden viewers are immersed in flowers, and become completely one with the garden itself.”