Emily Dickenson Once Had a Garden
“I was always attracted to mud.” – Emily Dickinson
A garden is ephemeral. It is an artificial creation, an attempt to impose order on the chaos of the natural world. A garden will last only as long as it is cultivated. Once left without a gardener, nature’s divine disorder returns. A garden is also personal. Once passed along to a different set of hands a shift occurs. A new vision takes hold.
Emily Dickinson once had a garden. It was her place of joy, her sanctuary, an Eden. It was also a source of inspiration. The plants and the creatures who visited, the hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies, provided images and metaphors for her poetry and letters.
“I was reared in the garden, you know,” wrote Emily to Louise Norcross in late April 1859. Although she is now recognized as a great poet, in her lifetime, Emily was known by her friends and family for her garden. She studied botany at Amherst Academy and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. During her teen years, Emily created an herbarium, an album of pressed plants with over 400 wild and cultivated specimens and Latin nomenclature.
Emily was born in 1830 at the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst. The family moved when she was 10, but returned 15 years later, and she lived there until her death in 1886. Her garden on the east side of the house. To the west, was the Evergreens, the home of her brother, Austin, and her intimate friend and sister-in-law, Sue. Surrounding these cultivated grounds were fields and woods, where Emily and Carlo, her faithful Newfoundland, wandered, and where Emily found much to inspire her writing.
Although Emily never wrote about the plan or layout of her garden, others have. Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, recalled, “There were carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansies, platoons of sweet peas, hyacinths enough in May to give all the birds of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons of peony hedges and riffs of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction – a butterfly utopia.” Mable Loomis Todd, the mistress of Emily’s brother, remembered, “And then the roses and hedges of sweet peas, the masses of nasturtiums, and the stately procession of hollyhocks, in happy association with huge bushes of lemon verbena.”
Even in the winter months Emily continued to garden in the conservatory her father had built on the southeast corner of the house. Many fragrant plants, such as jasmine and gardenia perfumed the room. Hyacinth bulbs were forced in the conservatory and then brought up to Emily’s bedroom where they lined the windowsills. She wrote to Elizabeth Holland, “My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.”
Many people first encountered the poetry of Emily Dickinson when they received a bouquet of flowers from her with a note tucked inside. One third of her poems and half of her letters cite specific plants; many others mention the creatures in the garden. Her writing in letters could be straightforward: “tell Fanny and Papa to come with the sweet Williams, tell Vinnie I counted three peony noses, red as Sammie Matthew’s [son of stableman], just out of the ground.” Her poetry can be ethereal, as in a description of a hummingbird:
A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel,
A Resonance of Emerald,
A Rush of Cochineal,
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head,
The Mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride.
Other times it is earthbound:
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 –
The natural world and her garden were the backdrops of her writing. When she died. her body was laid out by her sister Vinnie and her beloved sister-in-law Sue, with violets and a pink lady slipper orchid at her neck and two heliotropes by her hands. Her sister continued to care for their garden until she died in 1899. When the properties were sold, the gardens were sacrificed to lawns and tennis courts. In 1915, the conservatory was torn down. To make matters worse, in 1938, a devastating hurricane blew through Amherst. More than one-hundred trees were toppled on the property. The massive oak by the Homestead is one survivor.
Today the Emily Dickinson Museum, owned by Amherst College, consists of the Homestead and the Evergreens and the grounds with the remains of Emily’s garden. During museum hours, the gardens are open and an audio guide can be rented, which gives a history of the site. Lilacs, peonies, and lilies-of-the-valley are still growing, and may be the same plants Emily tended. The garden beds are reached by walking the stone path from the house, but the woods seem to be encroaching. Maple saplings are now growing in the lilacs. The path to the Evergreens is shaded, with no hollyhocks lining it, as in Emily’s time.
During the last few years, the conservatory has been reconstructed, and the museum has just received a 22-million-dollar endowment that will support its buildings, grounds and collections. My hope is that the gardens will be brought back to resemble the Eden Emily loved, with sweetpeas, hollyhocks, and more roses and peonies. She is gone and the garden will never be Emily Dickinson’s garden again. But Emily Dickinson once had a garden that sustained and inspired her.
“How is your garden, Mary? Are the pinks true, and the sweet Williams faithful? I’ve got a geranium like a sultana, and when the hummingbirds come down, geranium and I shut our eyes, and go far away.”