People Are Planting Flowers in Potholes Worldwide: See the Creative Protest Taking Place in Montreal, Ukraine & Beyond

In 2015, Paige Bre­i­thart, an artist and stu­dent liv­ing in Ham­tram­ck, Michi­gan, had grown tired of the count­less pot­holes mar­ring Ham­tram­ck­’s streets. So she took mat­ters into her own hands, and drove around town, fill­ing the pot­holes with flow­ers, replac­ing the decay with sym­bols of growth and beau­ty. The sto­ry went viral, and Bre­i­thart’s aes­thet­ic treat­ment has since caught on. Look around Twit­ter, and you’ll find sto­ries about flow­ers fill­ing pot­holes around the Unit­ed States, and indeed around the world.

In some cas­es, these gueril­la projects aren’t just dec­o­ra­tive, a sim­ple way to spruce up a neigh­bor­hood. There’s an activist ele­ment to them. In Bath, Eng­land, one flower pot vig­i­lante said:

In an area of Amer­i­ca there were a load of pot­holes filled in with pot plants, although that’s not what we are doing here. We think it’s a good thing to do but it’s more than about mak­ing peo­ple smile. Pot­holes are a real prob­lem and have the poten­tial to be death traps for bik­ers and cyclists and with cars there is an issue with blow-outs to wheels. The whole point is to raise aware­ness of them.

And local gov­ern­ments are tak­ing notice, though not always hap­pi­ly. Con­cerned that dri­vers might get sur­prised or dis­tract­ed by flow­ers sud­den­ly appear­ing in the mid­dle of a road, politi­cians are dis­cour­ag­ing this form of protest. But you can’t argue with the results. Once pro­test­ers call atten­tion to them, the pot­holes have a mag­i­cal way of get­ting prop­er­ly paved and filled. Quick­ly.

Below you can see a gallery of pot­holes around the world that have got­ten the flower treatment–from Mis­soula, Mon­tana, to Mon­tre­al, Bath, Bosnia and Ukraine. Maybe the artist from Chica­go (see image at bot­tom) is the one who got it right?