(upbeat music)
- [Mckenzie] Hi, my name's McKenzie.
I'm a bio major here at Smith.
- [Bridget] Hi, I'm Bridget.
I'm a women and gender studies major here at Smith.
So today we're just gonna take
a little walk around the bulb show,
see what's blooming, and get ready for spring.
This year, we really tried to focus on
keeping the species together,
and looking at all the different forms,
and shapes, and colors that bulbs can take.
- [Mckenzie] It's a great show
because every time you come it's a little bit different
'cause everything kind of blooms.
It's all blooming at the same time,
but it blooms a little differently every day.
So it's sort of a guessing game of timing.
And every year Dan Babineau who runs the show,
and Jimmy Grogan, and everyone involved,
gets a little bit better at tightening the window
where everything is blooming.
But even still, so there's certain things
that haven't quite popped yet,
and certain things that are in full bloom.
- [Bridget] Yeah, and in the mix of everything
we have things that aren't bulbs as well.
Like we have a lot of citrus plants
that are kind of liking this slightly cold environment.
We have a Loropetalum in the middle
that's related to witch-hazel.
And you can tell ’cause its flowers
kind of look like claws.
That's really beautiful
and is kind of like a bright pink.
One of my favorite bulbs is,
I don't know what they're really called,
but I call them snow drops.
And you can see them sometimes
around neighborhoods in this area poking up.
And I was always told that's like how you know
that winter is about to be over,
is when you can see the snow melt
and they just begin to poke their heads out of the ground.
So this is a good sign.
- [McKenzie] I still think that's really cool
about the bulb show is I'm constantly seeing things
that I've just never encountered before
and probably never would.
I don't even know what this is.
In the bulb show, we have a lot of different
plants happening at once.
And so in the spaces where they're being stored,
and where they're being sorted,
we keep them numerically organized.
And so a lot of these plants,
while we know what they are,
they aren't individually labeled
like you'd see in the rest of the greenhouse
because they're sort of like a one and done thing.
But, I mean the structure of spring bulbs
is really sort of this elegant thing that I don't know,
there's something unique about the way
they come up and down. - It looks like fish scales.
- [McKenzie] Yeah it does.
- [Bridget] It's like a fish skin.
- [McKenzie] And it's not even open yet.
This is the flower before it's even open,
it's so interesting.
- [Bridget] Fishiest bulb, oh wait.
Is it broken? - I don't think so.
- [Bridget] Wow, okay.
Whoever knows what this is, leave a comment below.
- [McKenzie] We will figure it out.
- [Bridget] Me and McKenzie were just talking
before you came in about how we really want the flowers
to kind of seem as though they're caving in on you,
like you're fully surrounded.
And part of that is that the flowers
all wanna go to the sun.
So to make that illusion, you have to constantly
turn them inwards, and they keep going,
and you turn them in, and they keeps going,
you turn them in.
So it's all kind of part of the feeling
that they're coming towards you.
And we also stake them up
because sometimes their flowers are so heavy
they wanna totally just droop over.
- These. - Oh look at that!
- [Bridget] I love these.
They look like-- - It's a crocus.
- [McKenzie] Bandaged little claws,
like they got burnt and they needed to get wrapped up.
And then they're just springing out,
their little fingers like this.
- [Bridget] Oh they're so cute.
- [McKenzie] Doesn't it look like
they all have like a cast on?
- [Bridget] It's true.
I've never noticed that about them before.
Crocus come in all different colors and sizes too,
which is really a fun thing about them.
There's not a ton of them in bloom right next to us.
But they're one of the most common things you'll find
out in the wild, maybe not that yellow one,
but purple and white crocuses are super common.
They naturalize really, really well out in our environment.
What is that?
- [Bridget] I don't know, but I touched it
and I was like, is it gonna rub off on me?
And it did.
- [McKenzie] It's so weird.
Oh, I can tell you what it is.
It's rhododendron beyerinckianum.
- [Bridget] Another great example
of stuff we grow in here.
- [McKenzie] Ericaceae, so it's related to blueberries.
- [Bridget] Perfect, perfect.
Which is really interesting.
That's another cool thing, that was definitely
brought in here to be a textural color contrast
to the things around it.
And as you can see, it really highlights
these purple tulips kind of right in front of it
in a way that's super cool.
I don't know what color this tulip
is gonna be when it comes out,
but it's probably gonna look really great
in front of that dark background.
But this is a cool thing that grows in here
that's been kind of cultivated by the other gardeners,
by Dan Babineau, and some of the other people.
Knowing that this show happens every year.
So encouraging these blooms to sort of thrive
in the under bench space.
And I really wanna say these are the snowflakes,
but I could be totally wrong about that.
So don't believe me.
But I think it's really beautiful
how they have this tall kind of elegance to them.
And these are another early bloomer
in the spring that come up.
And I think that they just, I love this little
dangly way that spring bulbs have of living.
I think it's really elegant and soft.
And I think this is a cool example
of how we're always thinking about these shows,
but we're never, we're not necessarily
always displaying them, right?
Like they're always here,
but they're not always present.
So hopefully this is the last of our virtual bulb shows.
We really hope that next year, even in the,
I would say the mum show, I would love to see in person.
But we hope you enjoyed this little tour of it.
- [McKenzie] Yeah, we hope it brings you
a little taste of spring,
and welcomes in the end of a very long, really hard winter.
And that it brings you a little happiness.
So hopefully you're staying safe,
and you're healthy, and you're having a calm time.
- [Bridget] And when you close your eyes,
maybe you can see this stuff.
If you look really hard.
You can just close your eyes really tight
and you'll be here. (laughs)
You could be here.