The tables are covered with flowers. The marigolds are vivid orange, and they’re lying in a jumble of sunflowers with centers no wider than a thumb, and maroon-red spikes as feathery as astilbe … and all of them are bright in the middle of February.
The room is warm with voices too. I’ve walked into the Plant Connector on a winter Monday night, when downtown North Adams is quiet, and people are standing around the tables and talking. Meg Bantle and Laura Tupper-Palches from Full Well Farm are teaching a workshop on how to make flower crowns.
They dried the flowers last summer in their barn, carefully out of the sun to keep their color. And they brought them here to spread out on the tables in generous armfuls. They’ve drawn a varied crowd of women, all ages from grand-daughter to grandmother.
We each take a semi-circle of wire and walk around the table, choosing flowers one at a time. We ease stems apart to compare the hues and shapes of petals. The slowness of it laps around us. You hold a stem against the wire and wrap a waxy green tape to bind it, then lay on another, following the arc.
Here are tall grasses and delicate pods, and vivid heads of tiny blossoms that cluster like clover and shade from peach to sunset to cream. I think they’re called gomphrena, globe amaranth, and maybe that’s how we end up talking about amaranth seeds and flour, while three generations of a family compare notes, and someone tries on her creation to applause.
It feels like a rare thing, to be surrounded with color in late winter, and meet a flower I’ve never met before — and learn a new word too. A flower head made of tiny flowers is called an inflorescence. …
Dried flowers show vivid color in a workshop on making flower crowns with Full Well Farm at the Plant Connector in North Adams.
February gives unexpected glimpses of color when you explore. Armando Cortes and his brother danced at Mass MoCA over the weekend, trading foot percussion in the midst of his ceramics, and Marc Swanson’s painting catches the moon on the water in the deep green shade of EJ Hill’s curtains. You can walk onto the platform of Hill’s working roller coaster and stand surrounded in the center of the rose-pink loop …
The pink roller coaster track loops across the old mill floor in EJ Hill's Brake Run Helix in Building 5 at Mass MoCA.
Moonloght touches deep green water in Marc Swanson's painting in Marc Swanson explores loss for humans and the natural world in A memorial to ice at the dead deer disco at Mass MoCA.
Bright flowers bloom in the annual spring blubl show at the Berkshire Botanical Garden.
You can also read Octavia Butler’s fantasy with the Bear and Bee Bookshop — or if you’re a touch farther north, try the W Collective’s chai, up in Bennington, Vt., and homemade pastries like strawberry poptarts …
Events coming up …
Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.
