Hilltown Families 
Flowers ❥ Happy Bouquets in the Pioneer Valley
Note 16, Flowers
Very often at Tuesday Market I come with camera and snap photos of flowers. In fact, often that’s the only thing I photograph at the market. (Photo credit: Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser)
It hit me yesterday at the Tuesday Market how much the flowers around here mean to me. I’m not a big bouquet person (although, as you read on, ask yourself why didn’t she buy some of these flowers she fell in love with?). I enjoy when we have flowers on the table, but then, they wilt and droop and dry up and eventually we toss ‘em and I think I didn’t care about them correctly and I certainly didn’t dispose of them quickly enough.
I think maybe because I walk so many places, my main enjoyment of flowers comes in motion. I loop around the Smith campus often, near the greenhouse and that’s like a living bouquet or very still performance art along a fence (hat tip to Jeff, the gardener there). Many neighbors have lovely gardens. It’s fun to see the first snowdrops and to make up haiku about irises and those floozies the peonies (I love when flowers bring words to mind like that, floozies.). Over the years, I’ve gotten more attuned to the way colors move in waves, the whites, yellows and purples bleed into the pinks and magentas to the orange and red tiger lilies and on, the black eyed Susans and sunflowers with their hearty rays and dark centers. Textures shift. The flowers’ march across spring and summer and fall evoke memories of visits to San Francisco and Berkeley and Oakland with their microclimates. Change is dramatic and subtle all at once. It’s so distinguishable.
As a person who prefers the temperate seasons—and truthfully, a more temperate climate—I am surprised again and again that I actually notice these flowers with such attentiveness and that I adore them so much. Grateful to gardeners and wildflowers, grateful to a part of the world that holds so much fullness each year—the rounds from first flowers to last, I guess I wouldn’t trade this. Except, perhaps in January or February, when I’d give almost anything for a balmy breeze.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah is a writer, who lives in Northampton with her husband and four children. She contributes to Preview Massachusetts Magazine, as well as other publications and writes a parenting blog Standing in the Shadows at the Valley Advocate. She moved to the Valley to attend Hampshire College—and found the Valley such a nice place, she stayed!
