Walking through wildflowers taller than I am makes me want to laugh and lie back and watch the sky … they give perspective, somehow. The yellow coneflower grows higher than I can reach, and a bee lands right at my eye level, busy in the cluster of tiny flowers that make the cone.
This close I can see the minute florets clearly. Some of them hold dark tips. Are they the anthers and stamens, where the flower makes and keeps pollen? Yellow filaments are curving from others, and I wish I knew more about where this worker bee is drinking. She’s iridescent in the sunlight.
Meadows have a glow in September. Leaves have a golden cast and the golden rod is starting to peak, and the bushes along the boardwalk are thick with deep blue fruit — are they black chokeberries?
Cutleaf coneflower blooms wild in Canoe Meadows.
Maybe I’ll catch a bird walk with Zach Adams while we’re still in migration season, so I can ask him. I wonder how many wildflowers bloom at the end of summer, and how many fall meadow flowers I haven’t even seen yet.
And if I were walking here before European incomers (both people and plants) changed the landscape, how would the meadow look … who would be blooming, and flying, and opening to the sun?
Earlier this summer, Mohican herbalist Misty Cook came the Berkshires to talk about healing plants like the milkweed forming their seed pods now. She told us about picking young milkweed shoots in the spring. And remembering, I wish she would walk here and talk, with the Joe Pye Weed in full blow, and I could listen.
Wildflowers bloom in the wetlands at Canoe Meadows.
Joe-Pye Weed shows wide heads of purple flowers in the late summer at Canoe Meadows.
We Are Still Here
At least an estimated 100,000 Native people lived in Massachusetts before European contact — and throughout September the Osher Institute of Lifetime Learning (OLLI) at Berkshire Community college will celebrate their stories in We Are Still Here: Northeastern Indigenous Peoples — walks and talks, performances and stories.
You can explore art shows, music, tours of historic sites with emphasis on connections with the Indigenous community, reading groups focused on books by Indigenous writers of the Northeast and talks on people and places, past and future …
Golden rod blooms across the meadows at Thomas Palmer preserve.
Cutleaf coneflower blooms wild in Canoe Meadows.
Bonney Hartley, Historic Preservation Officer for the Stockbridge Munsee community of the Mohican Nation, stands under an arbor of grape leaves at the Mission House in Stockbridge. Press photo courtesy of the photographer
Goldenrod blooms at Thomas Palmer Brook Preserve in Great Barrington.
Flutist Hawk Henries will perform as pat of We Are Still Here, a series of events honoring Indigenous peoples of the Northeast. Press photo courtesy of the artist.
The Housatonic Rover gleams in late afternoon sunlight near the homesite of Uhhaunauaunmut, a leader and captain, orator and ambassador also called King Solomon, as Bonney Hartley, historic preservation manager for the Stockbridge Munsee community of the Mohican Nation, explains in the newly opened exhibit at the Berkshire Museum.
Kimberley, a Native woman, looks out from Nayana LaFond will show her artwork at the Lichtenstein Center as part of The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Project. Press image courtesy of First Fridays Artswalk
Bonney Hartley, historic preservation manager for the Stockbridge Munsee community of the Mohican Nation, and a team of volunteers work at a dig at the site of the 1783 Ox Roast in Stockbridge. Press photo courtesy of the Mohican nation.
Events coming up …
Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.
