Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life

To know a poet is to learn what makes her heart sing.

To discover a young child's aptitude, perhaps her genius, then carefully watch what she does. Notice what drives the child's curiosity. If you want to destroy her muse, then jump in, take the lead, talk too much, and show her how to do what she needs to self-discover. A perfect parent for a bel esprit is one who discreetly provides the tools, and shows delight and sincere interest in what the child wishes to share. Edwin Dickinson was the perfect father for the young naturalist and poet, Emily Dickinson.

Emily loved to play in the mud; and wander the woodlands looking for wildflowers. Her mother worried for her safety, so her dad provided her with a gigantic dog, most likely a Newfoundland or Saint Bernard, who became her constant companion for 16 years. She named him Carlo and proclaimed him to be her "shaggy ally" who "knows but does not tell."

I robbed the Woods

The trusting Woods

The unsuspecting Trees

Brought out their Burs and Mosses

My fantasy to please

Emily grew up in a sprawling home in the center of Amherst. "Homestead" was perched on a knoll, with an abundance of trees, a barn, and a meadow and stream, ready for wading.

Her parents provided her with a library, stationery for letter writing, and opportunity to study at Amherst Academy where she learned botany. After classes, she walked through her garden with a magnifying glass. She collected botanical words as she did flowers for her herbarium, a 66-page book of pressed, dried plants, and sprinkled her poetry with the language of flowers.

I held a jewel in my fingers

And went to sleep

The day was warm, and winds were prosy

I said "twill keep."

I woke – and child my honest fingers,

The Gem was gone

And now, an Amethyst remembrance

Is all I own. (1861 poem 261)

Emily's mother had keen interest in gardening; and provided plots for Emily and her sister to cultivate as they wished. Her father and brother, both lawyers, were also passionate landscape designers.

In her teens, Emily traveled to other towns in Massachusetts to visit relatives. At age 17, she attended Mount Holyoke college where she studied science and the classics. During these travel sojourns she left strict instructions for the care of her garden to her younger sister, Vinnie. In 1853, she took one of her final trips away from home, to spend three months in Washington, DC, when her father was elected to the House of Representatives.

By her twenties, Emily lived in her head and in her garden. She wrote thousands of poems on small scraps of paper, and then tucked them away in a chest. As a child, her father provided her with a beautiful writing desk, and a lovely spot to write with large windows looking out over the grounds from her upstairs bedroom. Flowered wallpaper cheered her in winter.

She planted flowers for every season, as well as exotics for the glass conservatory her father built for her off his office. He provided Emily with a replica of her bedroom desk in his office, looking out to the conservatory, for her creative muse.

In her poetry, she documented much of what she saw. She relayed her thoughts and messages to others through her poems and small symbolic bouquets of flowers, rarely in face to face contact. However, she loved to interact with Austin's children and their friends, sending messages, poems and ginger cookies in a basket from her upstairs window. The children sent her found objects from the garden in response.

As children bid the Guest "good night"

And then reluctant turn

My flowers raise their pretty lips

Then put their nightgowns on

As children caper when they wake

Merry that it is Morn

My flowers from a hundred cribs

Will peep, and prance again.

(1859)

As she became more reclusive, Emily rarely left the homestead, which also included her brother's house on the same parcel of land. Her father built the home for son, Austin, when he married Sue Norcross, Emily's best friend. Like his father, Austin developed a passion for landscape design and set out to build an arboretum of trees and shrubs. He also laid the foundation landscapes for many historic buildings in Amherst.

Austin and Sue entertained an array of famous guests including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of Little Women. Emily often listened to the dinner conversations, hidden from sight in a nearby room or from the top of the steps. On occasion, she would send down a poem to the visitor, written on a scrap of paper, if she was particularly delighted with a dazzling dinner conversation. Guests were always mystified and thrilled. A dinner with Emily's ghost was quite magical. Still is, if you can hear her poetry, as you walk through the two homes that made up her world.

The leaves like Women, interchange

Sagacious Confidence

Somewhat of Nods and somewhat

Portentous inference

The parties in both cases

Enjoying secrecy

Inviolable compact

To notoriety

1865

I also love to garden and seek out books on historic gardens. Of all the gardening books I have read, none provided such a wonderful journey as Marta McDowell's, Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life (Timber Press, 2019). The book tells the story of Emily through her garden and the flowers that inspired her connection between trowel and pen. My son discovered and gifted me the book, knowing I would love it.

For those of you who have enjoyed the fictionalized account of Emily's youth in the Apple TV series, "Dickinson", so much more will be fleshed out by reading this book. For example, you will learn more about her relationship, with Thomas Higginson, the publisher, through her extensive correspondence with him in 71 letters. When Emily met Higginson, she shared a cache of her poetry with him, persuaded by Sue, her sister-in-law. Higginson may have had a relationship with Sue. Emily, also, was quite taken by him.

In that one meeting with Higginson, she handed him a lily, as a way of introduction. Emily knew "the language of flowers" and in flower language, the lily symbolizes flirtation or attraction. At first she was reluctant and anxious about publishing her work, later guardedly elated, and finally disappointed. Higginson only published one poem, The May Wine, during Emily's lifetime, and refused to return her poems in spite of Emily's requests to retrieve them.

The May Wine

I taste a liquor never brewed

From Tankards scooped in Pearl

Not all the Frankfort Berries

Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air –am I

And Debauchee of Dew

Reeling thro' endless summer days

From inns of molten blue

When "landlords" turn the drunken Bee

Out of the Foxglove's door

When Butterflies renounce their "drams"

I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats

And Saints –to windows run

To see the little Tippler

Leaning against the –Sun!

Emily's sister-in-law, Sue, and another childhood friend, Mabel Loomis, recognized Emily's poetic brilliance and encouraged her work. But Emily, herself, was satisfied to pen the poems that rushed forth from her brain, and then leave them to be destroyed after her death.

Fortunately for those who treasure Emily Dickinson's poetry, her sister Vinnie, ignored Emily's request to burn all her correspondence and poetry upon her death. Initially, Vinnie burned hundreds of Emily's letters, as requested. Then she came upon a trove of Emily's poems, handwritten on scraps of paper. She stopped short of burning Emily's poetry.

After Emily's death, her childhood friend, Mabel Loomis Todd, took up the banner to save her remaining poems. Once married, Mabel built a home in sight of Austin's home, and he designed her garden. Austin and Mabel were thought to be lovers. Mabel transcribed the poet's spidery script using an ancient typewriter. She convinced Higginson of their worth and he agreed to publish a collection of the poetry. Mabel's daughter provided historical documents and furniture from Emily's home and these are now part of the Amherst and Homestead Museums.

The book is laid out by seasons, with many photos of Emily's home and grounds, her herbarium, and botanical drawings of her garden, made by her contemporaries, as well as poetry that depicts her seasonal interests and observations. The book culminates with a complete index of the plants in her gardens that grew in size and scope with each year; with lovely descriptions that relate back to historical documentation or her poetry.

The author of this book, Marta McDowell, spent much of her working years as an insurance company executive. In her mid-forties she was driving between cities and pulled off at an interstate rest area. Thumbing through the local tourist brochures, her eyes lit on a brochure for the Emily Dickinson Homestead. As she wrote in her introduction, "the heart of a liberal arts major still beat in my suit-clad frame". Bits of Dickinson's poems fluttered in her distant memory, "their own thing with feathers."

McDowell called the number on the brochure and was told she would be able to drive to the museum in time to view it before closing. McDowell described her encounter as "transcendental". She discovered that like herself, Emily was a gardener. Over the next few years, Emily's garden "became a way for me to learn, to think about her life and her poems in the context of her pursuit of plants. It was Dickinson who brought me to garden writing……. And now, to begin again."

The author's personal story of discovery is another very beautiful aspect of this book. Some of us do not end up doing in life what we were meant to be and do. Those childhood passions give way to guidance from well-meaning adults or the practicalities of survival. We each have an opportunity to declare a second chance at opening our eyes afresh and revisiting what we might still become.

With this book I invite my readers, who are gardeners or poets or both, to be spell-bound by what you learn from each beautiful page. And to realize from Marta McDowell's experience, that there may be something else out there for you, a possibility to rediscover who you are, and where you might travel with the talents that lie latent, ready to bloom.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few. (1779)

I would love to hear your stories of personal re-discovery or any salient tidbits you know about the fascinating life and work of Emily Dickinson. writeme@deborah-llewellyn.com

Photo acknowledgements: Please note that most of the photos are taken from McDowell's book. They show her home, which is now a museum, her back garden, the path from her house to her brother's and a picture of her conservatory. Note a page in her herbarium that is on display at Homestead. Emily grew Rudbekia and Cone Flowers, but these photos were taken in my garden.