Inside The New York Botanical Garden
Emily Dickinson
Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions, Gardening Tips on May 3 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
This spring The New York Botanical Garden is paying tribute to the American poet Emily Dickinson in the exhibition, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. Emily Dickinson was an avid gardener and an amateur botanist. She carefully pressed and dried wildflowers and slipped them between the pages of her letters and her poems. She presented flowers with a few lines of verse as a welcoming gift to the occasional visitor.
As poets did in earlier times, Emily Dickinson referred to the symbolic meaning of flowers in her poems. She saw the violet as a sign of humility, the native arbutus as an emblem of candor, and the poppy as a projection of doom.
The language of flowers, which assigns symbolic meanings to flowers and plants, was a craze in 19th-century America. Floral dictionaries flooded the market, ranging from simple indexes to elaborate texts with colorful images.
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Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions, Programs and Events on April 30 2010, by Plant Talk
 Mayor Bloomberg, Sigourney Weaver, State Poet Kick Off Exhibition
During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886) was better known as a gardener than as a poet. Plants and flowers significantly influenced her poetry and other writings, most of which were not published until after her death. The Garden’s exhibition, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers, co-presented with the Poetry Society of America, illuminates this American poet’s life and work, the connections that exist between her life and poems, and her study and love of flowers and gardens.
The show features a re-creation of Dickinson’s home and garden in the Haupt Conservatory, an exposition about her life in the Mertz Library, and a Poetry Walk, a self-guided tour, with Dickinson’s poems on signs located among the Botanical Garden’s collections, near the flowers that inspired her.
 Yesterday, the Garden kicked off the exhibition with Poem in Your Pocket Day. We celebrated with Mayor Bloomberg, Sigourney Weaver, Garden President and CEO Gregory Long, State Poet of New York Jean Valentine, and 5th grader Lanasia McMillan of P.S. 46 reading poems by and inspired by Emily Dickinson. The Mayor even wrote his own New York City version of Hope is a thing with feathers. Live tweeting during the program definitely put a modern feel to the classic poetry.
The Big Read Marathon Poetry Reading and other kickoff events for Emily Dickinson’s Garden continue all weekend.
- It’s not too late to sign up to read your favorite Dickinson poems. Click here.
- Bring the family! The Children’s Poetry Garden is filled with flowers and the words of Emily Dickinson. Kids catch the inspiration and then can draw, color, and write their own poetry in a field notebook to take home.
- In a live one-woman performance, The Belle of Amherst, actress and author Barbara Dana presents the life and poetry of Dickinson.
Enjoy garden lectures, home gardening demonstrations, tours, and more!
Don’t miss out. The forecast looks great for the next few days, and the Poetry Walk in the Garden is the perfect way to spend a sunny day.
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Posted in Emily Dickinson, Holiday Train Show on January 6 2010, by Plant Talk
Celebrating the Season and Looking Ahead to Our Spring Exhibition
Carol Capobianco is Editorial Content Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
Garden staff members have been busy learning all they can about Emily Dickinson and her poetry in advance of the Botanical Garden’s spring exhibition, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers, May 1–June 13, 2010. We take note wherever and whenever we see her name.
So when we saw in a datebook, by chance, a gingerbread recipe by Emily Dickinson, we decided to blog about it, since the Garden currently is presenting Gingerbread Adventures in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden as part of the Holiday Train Show.
With a little digging around I learned that Dickinson had a bit of a reputation as a baker in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. In fact, she was particularly known for her gingerbread (and Rye and Indian bread), and would lower a basket of it to children below (photo by Lewis S. Mudge, courtesy of his estate), according to Emily Dickinson: Profile of the Poet as Cook, with Selected Recipes, by Nancy Harris Brose, Juliana McGovern Dupre, Wendy Tocher Kohler, and Jean McClure Mudge, and published in 1976. We have a copy of this 28-page booklet in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, where in spring 60 objects that tell the story of Dickinson’s life will be on view in the Rondina and LoFaro Gallery. (Complementing this will be a re-creation of her garden in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and a poetry walk throughout the Garden’s grounds.)
My intention was simply to post the recipe here, with permission from Jean Mudge, and let you try it out for yourself. However, I got caught up in the “everything Emily” mood, and to celebrate her 179th birthday (December 10), I decided to try making the recipe myself to share with co-workers.
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