Emily Dickinson's Flowers

Poem On A Poster.

Admire the flowers, plants and trees. Let the fragrance intoxicate.

One of the botanic garden tour guides explains a poem by Emily Dickinson on this poster, like many throughout the exhibit. One effect of these poems-on-a- poster was to encourage awareness of how frequently the poet used flowers as imagery for intangible topics.

We arrived after four hours, near lunch time. However, most of our entourage were in no mood to eat. The Gardens are designed on a grand scale. The poems displayed on posters were certainly in keeping with such opulence of proportion!

The facade of the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens is an ambitious project to familiarize New Yorkers, and visitors who cannot make it (yet) to Amherst, with the poet's surroundings.

Indoor Flowers and Outdoor Varieties

If you like photographing flowers you will find yourself among like-minded others.

Artists, like my sweet friend, Victoria, in the photo, made lots of notes for her plans to paint.

As you see in the above photo of Polly, writers always have a pen or pencil. I didn't see any laptops on the day we were there.

Plans Are To Re-build Dickinson's Long Ago Destroyed Greenhouse

Dickinson's little glass indoor room for her flowers may reappear in the corner you see reserved in the photo marked off with granite blocks.

Emily Dickinson's father, Edward, built a little greenhouse onto the front of Amherst, Massachusetts' Dickinson Homestead, as an extension of the dining room, so that his flower-craving daughter could work with her plants all she liked.

After the Dickinson family were all dead and the house was owned by others, the homestead was restructured to appear as though no such protrusion ever existed, as it is in the above photo.

Plans are to re-build and re-create Dickinson's little glass indoor room for flowers. If you look closely, you can see the section "bricked off," for the future addition. Most visitors to the homestead are eager to see it come to life again.We start out at 7:30 a.m. in a two-bus entourage of area supporters of the programs in Amherst. We are all primed for a thoroughly Dickinson day!

Just for fun, here's my tale of touring Dickinson's Garden at the New York Botanical Garden in the summer of 2010. ~

There's a mixture of bright-eyed-and-bushie-tailed "morning people," and the "where's-my-3rd-cup-of-coffee" contingent. Most everyone are more "with it" than I, who gets mixed up and arrive first at the Homestead. Thanks to Museum Director Jane Wald, who gets me to the parking lot where the buses are filling up.

Many readers, it seems, share Emily Dickinson's love of gardening. I'm not a gardener, but I thoroughly enjoy the stunning beauty of the flowers so brilliantly displayed in the New York gardens, especially the fragrant species.

Perhaps with all the new visitors to the Emily Dickinson Museum as the result of the high-profile display in New York's Botanical Garden, funds will flourish to see the planned improvements soon.

"Through the Dark Sod - " An Emily Dickinson Poem

One of my favorite examples of Emily Dickinson's use of flowers - in this case a lily