Gardens of Emily Dickinson Y

The Gardens of Emily Dickinson Y The immortality of Flowers must enrich our own, and we certainly should resent a Redemption that excluded them – Emily Dickinson to Mrs. Sarah Tuckerman, 1877 the gardens of Emily Dickinson Judith Farr with Louise Carter harvard university press cambridge, massachusetts london, england 2004 Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College all rights reserved Printed in the United States of America isbn 0-674-01293-3 Page 351 constitutes an extension of the copyright page. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can also be found on that page. Title page photograph by Rosamond Purcell Design by Marianne Perlak For George and Ted Preface Y this book is written for the general reader, for gardeners, and for scholars interested in Emily Dickinson’s life and writing and in nineteenth-century gardening as depicted in American literature and painting. It offers a vision of the poet’s life in relation to her avo- cation—in truth, a second vocation—as a gardener. Through close readings of her poems and letters, I explore how often and how frankly, specifically, and variously she expressed her love for plants and flowers and her conviction that their “world” and her own were one. Although Dickinson’s fascination with botany has long been ac- knowledged, the extensive role played by flowers in her art as in her life has not been deeply considered. Whether she wrote about love or war, ugliness or beauty, vanity or virtue, heaven or hell, her flower garden often provided her with the narratives, tropes, and imagery she required. Occasionally, misreadings of Emily Dickinson’s poems have occurred when the critic fails to recognize that her subject or governing metaphor is a plant, or mistakes the kind of flower, plant, or even climatic condition she envisions. This book attempts to pro- vide a picture of her horticultural tastes and interests with an indica- tion of their broad extent and application. The book purposely adheres to no single contemporary scholarly methodology and eschews any but the most traditional and classic viii • Preface theoretical terminology. The common names of flowers are assigned their horticultural or botanical identifications; for example, the car- nation grown by Emily Dickinson in her conservatory is Dianthus caryophyllus, while the cottage pink grown in her garden is Dianthus plumarius. Some names are assigned provisionally when the flower to which Dickinson alludes is without an obvious modern equivalent. A list of flowers and plants grown by Emily Dickinson is provided in the Appendix. Quotations from and allusions to Dickinson’s poems given within the body of the text are usually from R. W. Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition (Harvard University Press, 1999). Sometimes, when textual or circumstantial information is needed, Franklin’s three-volume Poems is cited. This new variorum text, the work of forty years of arduous scholarship, now replaces Thomas H. Johnson’s groundbreaking Poems (1955)—the first volumes to repre- sent Dickinson’s diction, orthography, and punctuation with (for the most part) accuracy. Occasionally a poem will be reproduced here in accordance with its appearance in Emily Dickinson’s manuscript books or “fascicles.” In her manuscripts, the lineations of her poems often differ—sometimes with exciting aesthetic effects—from those found in the Franklin text, whether by Dickinson’s design or from other causes like an indifference on her part to keeping strict quatrain formation or margins in the copies she made for her personal use, or even from poor peripheral vision. The embattled textual controver- sies that now rage among Dickinson scholars are not addressed at length here because they are not central to the matter of this book. Interested readers may consult R. W. Franklin’s Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson to see facsimiles of the poems as Dickinson entered them into her private worksheets. The poet’s letters are quoted from Thomas H. Johnson’s The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1958). The parts of the book that I have written—the Introduction, Chap- ters 1 through 4, and the Epilogue—attempt to place Emily Dickin- Preface • ix son’s love for gardens in the cultural context of her day; to describe its origin, development, and relation to her family’s interests; and to consider the architecture and contents of her planted garden as a kind of analogue to those hundreds of poems and poetic letters about cro- cuses, daisies, daffodils, gentians, trillium, mayflowers, hyacinths, lilies, roses, jasmine, and other flowers that compose the landscape of her art. Her real garden served as an index to Dickinson’s concep- tion of “that garden unseen”—the inner plot she called the soul, with all its needs of cultivation and improvement, and beyond it, in a con- tinually interrogated, distrusted, but yearned-for distance, the garden of Heaven or “Paradise” to which she frequently alludes (L 92). Chapter 5, “Gardening with Emily Dickinson,” was prepared by Louise Carter, whose professional knowledge of flowers and landscape gardening has been a valuable resource for this book. From memoirs of the Dickinson family and friends, from the poet’s own testimony, and from modern analyses of the Dickinson grounds, this chapter hypothesizes the contents of Emily Dickinson’s garden and conservatory. It also describes the steps one might take to reproduce and maintain them. Those who love Dickinson’s poems, those who love gardens may want to grow the flowers she did. Therefore, each of the flowers she is known to have cultivated is described, and the best conditions for its growth and care are laid out. Readers less interested in gardening may still be glad to read de- scriptions of Dickinson’s flowers and their requirements—to learn, for instance, that Emily’s “Sweet Sultans,” to which she alluded on several occasions with punning delight, were not oriental monarchs but thistle-like blooms from the Levant and, like most of her favorite flowers, heavily scented. Such knowledge clarifies her language in poems and letters and helps to explain tastes that were often confidently paradoxical: Dickinson’s passion for the romantic and unknown in- habited a consciousness that saw “New Englandly” and chose to write in both astringent and voluptuous cadences (F 256). In the Epilogue I address a topic of importance: the seasons as they x • Preface appear in Dickinson’s natural garden and in the garden of her art. While it is true that Emily Dickinson’s garden was surrounded by her father’s land, it was also in its way a hortus conclusus, a private domain like the conservatory or her unpublished manuscripts. The actual garden she gazed at in various seasons helped to inspire the garden of the poems. There, summer and fall, springtime and winter had differing powers that moved her to envision a mythic universe. Judith Farr Contents Y Introduction 1 one. Gardening in Eden 13 two. The Woodland Garden 75 three. The Enclosed Garden 139 four. The “Garden in the Brain” 175 five. Gardening with Emily Dickinson 214 Louise Carter Epilogue: The Gardener in Her Seasons 264 Appendix: Flowers and Plants Grown by Emily Dickinson 299 Abbreviations 301 Notes 303 Acknowledgments 327 Index of Poems Cited 329 Index 333 Illustrations Indian pipes painted by Mabel Loomis Todd. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, by permission of the Trustees of Amherst College. 16 Samuel Bowles. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 35 Jasmine from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1787. Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Studies in Landscape Architecture. 43 Facsimile of Emily Dickinson’s “Jasmin” note. The Rosenbach Museum and Library. 48 Susan Gilbert Dickinson as a young woman. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 50 Fritillaria imperialis (Crown Imperial). Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Studies in Landscape Architecture. 51 Judge Otis Phillips Lord. Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 57 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, c. 1860. Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department, courtesy of the Trustees. 64 Fra Filippo Lippi, The Annunciation. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 67 Sarah Choate Sears, Untitled (young woman with lilies). Harvard University Art Museums. 68 xiv • Illustrations Daylily from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1788. Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Studies in Landscape Architecture. 73 Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype taken in 1847. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, by permission of the Trustees of Amherst College. 77 Mary Cassatt, Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly (1880). Metropolitan Museum of Art. 79 Eastman Johnson, Hollyhocks (1876). New Britain Museum of American Art. 80 Frederick Frieseke, Hollyhocks. National Academy of Design, New York. 81 Gabriella F. (Eddy) White, “Dandelion,” from Flowers of America (1876). MS Typ 598, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. 88 Fidelia Bridges, Calla Lily (1875). Brooklyn Museum of Art. 92 Page one of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium. Houghton Library, Harvard University. 100 Mabel Loomis Todd, daguerreotype. Mabel Loomis Todd papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 101 Gabriella F. (Eddy) White, “Lady’s Slipper,” from Flowers of America (1876). MS Typ 598, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. 107 Pansy violets (Violae) from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium. Houghton Library, Harvard University. 118 Lady’s slipper from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1792. Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Studies in Landscape Architecture. 138 Winslow Homer, The Butterfly (1872). Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. 144 Maria Sibylla Merian, hand-colored engraving. National Museum of Women in the Arts. 147 Illustrations • xv The Dickinson Homestead in the nineteenth century. Houghton Library, Harvard University. 148 Martin Johnson Heade, Orchids and Hummingbird.

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