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Cures for Strange Times: Foraging and Flowers

Thu, January 21st, 2021
5:30 pm
- 7:00 pm

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Cures for Strange Times is a series of virtual workshops throughout January that brings wellness and creativity together in hands-on creative exchanges. Pairing wellness practitioners from the Northern Berkshire community with local artists and makers, these interactive experiences center reflection, play, making and embodiment as forms of learning and being.

The third session brings together botanist Joan Edwards and floral designer Wendy Hybl Fannin, who will call attention to the beauty of the winter landscape in this discussion and workshop featuring foraged and locally-found botanicals.

Register for this free virtual event here. No prior experience required.

About the artists

Joan Edwards is a botanist with a special interest in understanding the evolution of biodiversity by studying organisms in their natural setting. Her current studies on pollination focus on the evolutionary design and conservation of flowers and their pollinators, which is critical to understand in the face of loss of species worldwide. Using time-lapse photography she captures near-complete records of insect visitors to flowers. A special focus is biomechanics and adaptive significance of ultra-fast plant movements—plant actions that are so quick they occur on the order of milliseconds. Using high-speed video (up to 100,000 fps) she studies the evolutionary significance and biomechanics of fast movements including the trebuchet catapults of bunchberry dogwood, the vortex rings of Sphagnum moss, the splash cups of liverworts and the “poppers” of wood sorrel. Her early fieldwork was on the impact of moose herbivory on plants in the boreal forests of Isle Royale National Park. She is  also a Professor of Biology at Williams College where she has been a faculty member since 1979. At Williams she teaches courses in Ecology, Plant Systematics, Tropical Biology and Conservation Biology. She completed her Ph.D. in Botany at the University of Michigan where she also did her undergraduate studies. She is the Samuel Fessenden Clarke Professor of Biology and is also a faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program at Williams.

Hailing the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, Wendy Hybl Fannin studied painting, photography and mixed media at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. More recently she has studied with some of New York’s most exceptional floral artists, and earned a Certificate in Floral Art & Design from Pratt Institute. Her history of entrepreneurship, art, flower farming and her long career in creative direction and project management, naturally culminated in her latest endeavor in Floral Event Design. Wendy started Hybl Fannin Design in 2015 at her home and gardens in the hills of southern Vermont. In June of 2019 she opened her studio at Greylock WORKS in North Adams MA, passionately embracing the rich artistic community and architectural heritage of the Berkshires.

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