Crowds of visitors, hundreds upon hundreds of bulb flowers and a few very lucky bumblebees are filling The Botanic Garden at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
First opening on March 2, the 2024 Spring Bulb Show is a weekslong showcase of tulips, daffodils, and more.
Arriving on campus to take in the sights and fragrances were locals, alumni, and a fair share of first-time visitors.
Among them - Kathryn Berg, a Smith alumnus who brought her acapella group to Northampton as part of a retreat.
“It's just a gorgeous display and I love seeing the community that just really appreciates the beauty in the flowers, and the scents and just the artwork as well is really nice,” Berg said. “And it's a good excuse to get out and see other parts of the botanical garden as well."
As part of the show, several rooms at The Botanic Garden are packed with bulbs that come in a variety of sizes, colors, and species.
Walking through the displays counter-clockwise, guests flow through the space, spotting flowers such as the grand Exotic Emperor or low-lying garden hyacinth.
The floral displays are all made possible by the efforts of a team of students and staff, including Smith College Greenhouse Horticulturist, Lily Carone.
“I really love the fritillaria - those are kind of a crowd-pleaser,” Carone told WAMC. “They're unusual and tend to really captivate people.”
Carone says at least nine months go into planning, prepping and literally growing the two-week show.
“This year, the we ordered about 9,000 individual bulbs,” she explained. “So, that order goes in and then it's kind of a waiting game until late September, when the bulbs arrive from Holland.”
Once they arrive, Carone says, a large group of volunteer students descend on the garden for a day in October, getting the bulbs potted and placed in cold storage. From there, staff replicate the growth cycle.
“We gradually, over the course of a few weeks, drop the temperatures to hovering just above freezing,” she said. “This cold treatment mimics the experience that the bulbs undergo when they are outdoors.”
By February, they’re out of storage and, within a few weeks, are on display for the show.
Also on display, a number of art installations embedded in the flowers or, in the case of Celosia Rae Tilghman’s piece, flowing gently above the flowers.
In it, you see a series of polyester organza sheets, with an array of lines and ripples running through them. As Tilghman describes it, the work touches on queer mycology – a fungi-centered approach to exploring gender queerness.
“It's about the way that fungi and queer people transcend boundaries and how it's really helpful for us to look to plant life, and fungi specifically, to better understand ourselves and ways that we can sort of work together and be in community,” they explained.
Tilghman’s work is among a group of other pieces found among the flowers – all of which, the artist says, exist to complement the bulbs as viewers make their way through.
"One of our professors said to us that you can never imitate nature and win - nature will always win,” Tilghman said. “So, we really just looked for ways to sort of not do too much and just let the flowers shine because they're just so stunning."
And if bulbs aren’t your thing, there’s plenty of other plant life on display. That includes the palm house with its palm trees, the fern house with its ferns, and the succulent house with…you guessed it.
"I like the variety in all the different succulents and - I think it's just interesting to see just weird plants and there are a lot of weird plants here,” said Avnika Bali, a first-time visitor and part of Berg’s group.
If you want to take in some of the plant life, the bulb show at Smith College runs through March 17.
More information can be found here.
