Lewis Miller enjoys a reputation as something of maverick, whose unique talents have earned him the affectionate nicknames “the flower bandit” and “the Banksy of floral design.” Born and raised in California farm country, he studied horticulture in Seattle before moving to New York in 2000. Two years later he launched his own company, Lewis Miller Design, which quickly acquired a roster of stellar clients that included Michael Bloomberg and Richard Meier, plus arbiters of style such as Harry Winston and Carolina Herrera.
In October 2016, Miller organized the first of his famous “Flower Flashes.” Working before dawn, he surrounded the John Lennon Memorial in Central Park with a brightly colored halo of dahlias. Over the following years, Miller created dozens more of these surreptitious floral installations, using flowers left over after social events to decorate the most unlikely places, including trash cans, bus canopies and construction sites, engendering delight and wonder and earning the admiration of countless New Yorkers. It is chiefly for this work that Miller was recently awarded the 2025 Amy Angell Collier Montague Medal for outstanding civic achievement by The Garden Club of America.
Miller’s company also has offices in Palm Beach, and recently he agreed to create four free-style arrangements for Palm Beach Cottages & Gardens, using vases from the design gallery Authentic Provence, shot in The Artist Studio at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens. Miller is a delightfully articulate and unpretentious man, and it was a joy to watch him at work. He explained that his work emphasizes intuition rather than planning, and a reliance on feeling as opposed to rigid conception. Miller refuses to become what he calls “an indentured servant to good taste,” preferring to emphasize color, movement and texture, plus the use of local foliage and elements such as dried sticks and discolored leaves to create still lives that are not stiff, but natural and pulsating with energy. It is an honor to showcase the work of a true artist.
