Springtime Today at Emily Dickinson’s Homestead

Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions on May 14 2010, by Plant Talk

Author Finds Striking Comparison with Garden’s Re-Creation

Marta McDowell is author of Emily Dickinson’s Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and Gardener and teaches landscape history at The New York Botanical Garden, where she studied landscape design.

The other day I drove from the Botanical Garden to Amherst, Massachusetts, bookending a visit to Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers with a call on Emily Dickinson’s home, the Homestead, at the Emily Dickinson Museum. Winding through Westchester County and western Connecticut, I turned onto Interstate 91 following the Connecticut River up the so-called Pioneer Valley, settled by Dickinson’s ancestors in search of good agricultural land. The unseasonably warm spring weather we were having trailed me north from the Bronx, with the temperature reading in the mid-80s on the car thermometer when I finally got to Emily’s B&B (where else?) on North Prospect Street.

Emily Dickinson’s Amherst is pleasant in spring. Walking to her home early this morning, approaching from the west, I first encountered the Evergreens, home of her brother, Austin, and sister-in-law, Susan. The umbrella magnolias, Magnolia tripetala, were in bloom with their huge, unlikely blossoms open as their even larger leaves emerge. It still seems more tropical than native, but the USDA reports its range from Florida to Massachusetts.

Strolling the path between the houses “just wide enough for two who love,” I was struck by how beautifully the exhibition in the Botanical Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory captures the feeling of the woodland walk as it must have been in Dickinson’s day.

The lilacs, those ancient shrubs, were in full bloom around the Dickinson Homestead, their lavender blooms complementing the yellow ochre of the painted bricks of the house. Peonies were in full bud, a bit behind the Botanical Garden’s fine display opening up along Perennial Garden Way. Huge stands of bleeding heart, the old-fashioned Dicentra spectabilis, dominate the Homestead’s garden at the moment; the tulips were fading fast. I was taken by the fragrance wafting through the air, lilac and lily-of-the-valley no doubt, putting out their odors, as Dickinson put it, “from flasks – so small – You marvel how they held.”

The birds were joining in their morning harmonies: the jay, the mockingbird, the robin, and others I couldn’t place. The sun was lighting the clouds “a ribbon at a time” over the hills. What a joy it is to send her morning garden “To an admiring blog”!

References to Dickinson’s poems are from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1998): The lilac is an ancient shrub (F 1261); I tend my flowers for thee (F 367); I’ll tell you how the sun rose (F 204); and I’m nobody! Who are you (F 260).

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