Emily Dickinson, gardener

It will surprise some readers to learn that during her lifetime Emily Dickinson was better known as a gardener than as a poet.  Many books have been written about the "poet of Amherst" and about her poetry; this one is laser-focused on her gardening skills.  Written by a past Gardener-in-Residence at the Emily Dickinson Museum, the book proceeds "in calendar fashion" to detail the enormous variety of plants with which she was familiar, interspersing botanical details with excerpts from her poems.

"She shared a love of plants with her parents and siblings.  To friends, she sent bouquets, and to some of her numerous correspondents - over one thousand of her letters have been found - pressed flowers.

"She collected wildflowers, walking with her dog, Carlo.  She studied botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke*.  She tended both a small glass conservatory attached to the front of the house and a long flower garden sloping down the spacious east side of the grounds.  In winter, she forced hyacinth bulbs and in summer she knelt on a red blanket in her flower borders, performing horticulture's familiar rituals.

Emily Dickinson's garden served as a place of worship for her spiritual self:

"When she was old enough to choose, she abstained from the services held in the pillared Congregational church across from Amherst College.  She was, as she put it, a dissenter.  She practiced her rites in the garden:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -

I keep it, staying at Home -

With a Bobolink for a Chorister -

And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -

I, just wear my Wings -

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church -

Our little Sexton - sings.

"God" preaches a noted Clergyman -

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last -

I'm going, all along."  (#236, 1861)

As a companion book to this one, I would offer the herbarium she compiled (sixty-six pages, leather bound, containing over 400 pressed specimens labeled using the Linnaean system).  Our library system has a modern facsimile edition:

I'll use several of the pages in the coming weeks for a linkfest, but for now let me just share this page -

- which has this specimen in the lower right corner:

The facing page has Emily Dickinson's notation of "Climbing Bittersweet"...

... corrected by the editors of the facsimile edition to note that she had in fact pressed into her herbarium a specimen of poison ivy.

Posted for my friends in the Trinity "Weeds and Seeds" gardening forum group, with the hopes that they and my other old friends in the Boston area are spared the worst of the hurricane expected to arrive this weekend.

*I'll just footnote the remarkable attrition rate at Mt. Holyoke in that era: "She left school and returned home in August 1848, telling a friend that her father had decided not to send her back.  It wasn't unusual.  Of her class of 115, only 23 returned for a second year..."