by Alex McNamara, photograph by Corey Sipkin

Flowers are springing up overnight in SoHo. But they're not alive,
and they don't have roots.

Thanks to Michael De Feo, a 22-year-old East Village artist, man-
made paper and paint blossoms are budding in places where you'd
least expect a flower to be. Alley walls. Scaffolding. And subway
stations - until it got too dangerous.

De Feo plasters his trademark flower, which is painted on paper,
anywhere he can. Sometimes he brings a ladder. So far, he's
planted more than 4,000 duplicate flower images across the city.

The flowers express De Feo's affinity for public art without a
price tag.

Some of his friends have followed suit. One friend has begun paint-
ing pink elephants on the sidewalks. Walking down Third Avenue
on a Saturday planting stroll, De Feo points to a wooden bird in a
tree that his friend, Edward Kauss, paints and hangs in trees.

"That's one of my friend's birds," he said. "It's funny. He'll climb
a tree anywhere."

Two blocks later, he slaps a fresh flower on a telephone pole, ig-
noring curious stares.

The simple, five-petal design has become a familiar mark in SoHo.

De Feo would like to spread it further uptown.

"New York doesn't have enough flowers, you know," he said. "I'm
presenting something contrary to its environment. I try to make
people stop and think once, and be aware about their environment,
if I can."

For a guerilla flower artist, De Feo is the cautious type. Ever since
the police caught him red-handed painting a flower on a wall on
Prince Street, he tries to be low key. He started avoiding subways
after he was caught there too.

Now, he waits until nightfall to plant his special graffiti flowers,
which he spray paints through a FedEx stencil on sidewalks and
walls. "I try to avoid getting summonses and stuff," he said.

De Feo said his idea originated when he began working on a silk-
screen design in the basement of his parent's house in West-
chester two years ago. His first image, a crescent moon, was later
replaced by a minnow. Then, the flower.

That image is creeping inside the walls now too. Last year, he
did an installation of hundreds of flowers for The Tunnel and he'll
be doing another rave in the near future.

"It was an incredible success," he said. "A lot of people were
taking them with them, which was really cool."