The guest designer of the New York Botanical Garden’s 2026 Orchid Show spent his boyhood wanting to become Batman. Now he aspires to be a different superhero: Mr. Flower Fantastic.
“I guess my focus is about saving nature,” he said, “which ultimately, I think, saves people.”
Mr. Flower Fantastic — it’s his nom de bloom — spoke with me last week in the garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a steamy, sunny refuge from the Bronx’s surrounding Arctic air. He and a team were installing “The Orchid Show: Mr. Flower Fantastic’s Concrete Jungle,” an urban landscape overrun by wild delights. Opening on Saturday and running through April 26, the exhibition reflects the two Jamaicas that have influenced its designer: Jamaica, Queens, where he grew up, and Jamaica, the island, his mother’s ancestral home.
Inside, familiar New York structures sport tropical twists. Instead of ivy, lush layers of pink, white and fuchsia Phalaenopsis — the common but extremely varied moth orchid — cascade down a brownstone facade. A dumpster crammed with trash bags also overflows with blossoms. Mock subway stops — Orchid Avenue and Desert Avenue — appear, as well as a flower-filled newsstand where visitors can pick up instructions on orchid care.
“There’s a sort of uncanny way that he enlivens the objects that we surround ourselves with,” said Joanna L. Groarke, the garden’s vice president for exhibitions and programming. “The things we collect, like sneakers, or the things we see every day, like a hydrant, a fire hydrant that’s been opened up to cool off in the summertime. And he’s got this really creative way of bringing those to life, using flowers.”
MFF, as he likes to be called, has created city scenes that are recognizable and yet, like him, unidentifiable. He preserves his anonymity with a respirator mask that also keeps his beloved medium from aggravating his severe pollen allergy.
Anonymity is “honestly the most authentic way to share my work,” he said, “and to share it with an open heart, freely, without being criticized for being anyone I am or anyone I’m not.”
Over the past eight years, MFF has certainly become someone. A self-taught artist, he began leaving his floral work — the medium that makes him “most happy,” despite his allergy — around the city, in the anonymous style of Keith Haring. Recalling being beaten by local toughs as a boy in his mother’s garden, he chose a subject that he thought would appeal even to bullies: sneakers. His Instagram posts attracted Serena Williams’s team, who asked him to honor her at the 2018 U.S. Open by recreating the Nike shoe that Virgil Abloh designed for her.
The masked MFF presented Williams with that floral sculpture, a moment that led to developing art for brands like Nike, Adidas, Puma and Louis Vuitton, as well as a commissioned piece for the 2023-24 exhibition “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” at the Brooklyn Museum. His sneaker sculptures also hang from lampposts in “Concrete Jungle.”
“I don’t know if this is a therapy session or not,” he said of this 23rd annual Orchid Show, his first large solo. But the exhibition, which features thousands of living orchids rather than cut specimens, reveals more of himself than ever before: “This show is a journey into the parts of me that were seeds and started to grow.”
“Concrete Jungle” features New York haunts like a pizza joint, its roof decorated with whimsical slices in synthetic plant material. The exhibition also has a laundromat where, instead of swirling clothes, the mock machines reveal interior arrays of less common orchids like the Oncidium (including dancing lady orchids), the Zygonisia (such as snowbird orchids) and the miniature Cattleya.
Nearby, a “floralized” carwash evokes MFF’s childhood memories. “The carwash, for me, was like a portal that I transported through,” he said. The design includes a sculpted New York City yellow cab, surrounded by orchid plants, that recalls “Taxi!!!,” a 2024 work he created for the Queens Botanical Garden. Because of the demands of both installations, MFF used synthetic blossoms — carnations, his favorite flower — to cover the cabs’ molded chassis.
“Taxi!!!” “definitely got us on the radar of some different audiences,” Regina Forlenza, the assistant director of visitor services at the Queens garden, said in a phone interview. It drew “a lot of the younger demographic.”
The New York Botanical Garden is aiming for the same effect with programs that include Q. and A. sessions, sensory stations and, starting in March, Orchid Nights, a snack-and-cocktail series with D.J. April Hunt.
“There’s a different kind of relatability to my audience, because I really get to experience this with them, too,” said MFF, who selected the show’s dozens of orchid varieties with Brian Sullivan, the garden’s vice president for glasshouses and landscape. “I don’t consider myself an expert.”
Rather, he added: “I’m just a kid from Queens who found my community, found my voice, and is an advocate for nature. And I get to do it with a little bit of superhero flair.”
The Orchid Show: Mr. Flower Fantastic’s Concrete Jungle Feb. 7- April 26 at the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx; 718-817-8700, nybg.org.
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