Bee the Change (Weybridge, Vermont, est. 2016)
In collaboration with Nancy Winship Milliken (Charlotte, Vermont, b. 1962– )
Pollinator Meadow, 2022
Pollinator supportive plants
Courtesy of Bee the Change

Shelburne Museum is grateful to Bee the Change for their generous donation of this pollinator meadow for this exhibition. We are proud to once again collaborate with this organization, which has also established pollinator fields around the Museum’s two solar arrays.

Pollinators—such as bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, and other insects critical to food security—are a group upon which many other species depend, including our own. Every space where pollinators are nourished provides the opportunity to tell two stories: the alarming, accelerating rate of the decline in pollinators and the more positive message of how they respond to the creation of habitats that seek to restore them. 

This pollinator meadow exemplifies the power of mutualism. We think of nature in terms of the forces of predation and survival, selection and extinction, and in the rawness of parasitism and consumption, but there is another, more powerful force that lies beneath and drives the extraordinary biodiversity we observe. From the bird that is nourished by the berry and distributes the seed to the insect that moves the pollen, life forms work together, rooted in the ground as well as the sky. This is the power of mutualism.

Winship Milliken’s sculptures are grounded in the earth by massive timbers, yet they can be moved by environmental elements. They are not static, posed, or formed only by the human hand. Instead, the sculptures are subject to constant movement and alteration. Some move as a mass, and some are light and expressive in the least wind.

Blossoms also nod lightly in the wind but bob heavily underneath a winged visitor. Hungry and charged, dusted with pollen, insects drink and pollinate. With the arrival of the last butterfly, we hold still. Our impulse to travel is supplanted by the sense of arrival, for now we travel through observation as we peer into this well of transaction.

Rooted, we are in motion with the elements.

—Bee the Change

Learn more about Bee The Change by visiting their website.

View images of the pollinator meadow here:

See More from Nancy Winship Milliken: Varied and Alive