BOYLSTON, Mass. - The New England Botanic Garden is preparing for an annual display set to bring a pop of color to visitors’ winter.

"Patterns in Bloom" opens Feb. 10, and will feature more than 2,000 orchids arranged throughout their Tower Hill location, as well as more than 30 sculptures created by artist Molly Gambardella.

Gambardella’s work has been featured nationwide, and she was recently an artist in residence for the Ark Project at Yellowstone National Park. A primary focus of her work is using single-use plastic items to create artwork mimicking nature - in this case, orchids.

“I’ve been making work that's really around ecosystems and recognizing how everything is connected to everything else,” Gambardella said. “When I look at how things are being discarded or used or just defined as being this is a single use purpose, I just like to explore that and push those boundaries a little bit. I guess this really comes down to curiosity and playfulness.”

Gambardella used single-use plastic items to make orchids which vary in size, and will be displayed alongside the real orchids currently in the process of being delivered to Tower Hill. The process hasn’t been easy, and she’s been at it for quite awhile now.

“These have been growing and being built in my house, which is also my studio,” Gambardella said. “And so it's become quite an obstacle course in the course of the five months I've been working on this. It goes from cutting bags, folding, heating, there's sewing, there's welding, there's bending and sculpting.”

It’s also been a bit of controlled chaos in the Tower Hill greenhouse, where some orchids have already been delivered.

There are more than 28,000 known species, and horticulturist Megan Varnes said it’s always a very busy two week period leading up to the display’s grand opening.

“We have a couple growers that we have worked with for a little while now,” Varnes said. “We have one grower located in Hawaii, so the vast majority of our orchids are flown in from Hawaii, two day shipping, and then we get additional orchids from Canada, actually from Ontario.”

You can see the orchids and Gambardella’s sculptures in all their glory from Feb. 10 to March 17. Lea Morgan, exhibitions manager at New England Botanic Garden, said it’s always a refreshing change of pace for staff members and visitors dealing with an otherwise gray winter.

“This time of year, it is really a wonderful time to bring people to the garden,” Morgan said. “We have two conservatories, and we like to do this as a way to bring people in in the dark days of winter with some bright, colorful exhibits. And it helps us drive attendance and have spark some joy in people's winter.”