POETRY IN SILVER: THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS IN THE WORKS OF EMILY DICKINSON

2017 Julius I. Brown Award 

Kandy Vermeer Phillips

‘In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed.’ (T W Higginson’s Preface to the First Edition of Emily Dickinson’s Poems, page vi, 1890)

Students in Emily Dickinson’s day were required to collect plants for in class study, and they were instructed to make a personal herbarium with their finds. This practice encouraged botany students, male and female, to identify the names of plants and flowers. The exercise also taught them to be observant as they attempted to place each specimen into its class using the Linnaean system of counting pistols and stamens. Nature walks were also required as part of the student’s education and were intended to aid the understanding of the appearance and characteristics of plants, or as Ruskin would say, the plant’s biography in the field. Through these activities, Dickinson developed an intimate knowledge of the bloom time and locations of common and rare plants found in the Amherst, Massachusetts region during the mid-19th century.

It was noted quite early on how the woods surrounding the towns, schools, seminaries and colleges were being stripped of green material by students as part of their Botany education, and by adults interested in home beautification. Residents in Amherst and probably of other communities too, would regularly head to the woods, fields and bogs searching for plants, shrubs and saplings of interest to dig up in order to enhance the grounds around their homes. Emily Dickinson dug up and transplanted arbutus, violets, orchids, and cardinal flowers among others for her garden. Her brother Austin was fond of azaleas and rhododendrons, and he too removed them from their environs in order to add interest to his property, and that of the city commons.

Dickinson’s mid-19th century herbarium contains a record of the plants she collected that were growing in and around her Amherst community, including a number of rare ones. Her herbarium though is of little use to science due to its lack of data- the time of year, location and habitat for each specimen is missing. Her plants are often small sprigs and not entire plants that included the root system.

Herbaria today accomplish the same purpose as Dickinson’s although on a much more sophisticated level. For example, a herbarium sheet that I used to illustrate an Indian Pipe contained the information that it was collected in a specific local park’s picnic area in 1982, during the month of September. With that information available I could go to that specific location at the correct time of year to see if the population still existed.

If not, I could ask why not? A picnic area is more than likely to be a high traffic area. Were the plants trampled to the point of no return? Picked as a curiosity? Eaten by deer? Although Dickinson’s herbarium page featuring the Indian Pipe yields no such information, we learn in a letter written in 1862 to Mabel Loomis Todd that the Indian Pipe was her preferred flower of life.

Herbarium sheets show how a species may adapt or evolve. For example, Alice Tangerini and I located a Pink Lady’s Slipper Orchid (Cypripedium acaule) collected from Amherst, Massachusetts in 1890 in the U.S. National Herbarium (The National Museum of Natural History, Botany Department, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC). Compared to what Emily Dickinson had pressed in her herbarium, it was a bit larger, but still more compact than another example we found from a similar location and collected a few years later.

I attempted a reconstruction of the Pink Lady’s Slipper that Dickinson had collected for her herbarium. I traced an outline of her plant from my copy of the herbarium facsimile, and then placed it on top of various photocopied sheets of the same orchid from the Natural History Museum’s herbarium. I found a likely match and added the base of the leaves and root system to the Dickinson specimen and completed it as a silverpoint drawing. Next I examined a series of five Slipper orchids ranging from Dickinson’s 1840 specimen to one of my photos taken in 2018 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I made a composite sketch that also included a drawing based on a 1792 etching of the Pink Lady’s Slipper. It was fascinating to discover how the shape of the pouch developed over time from the very compact form of 1792 to the elegant form from 2018. Without the records from the herbarium sheets, this exercise would have been impossible. To Dickinson, the orchid illustrates an adventurous spirit as found in the Franklin Edition’s poem 31, a couplet that states that those who keep an Orchis’s heart will find the swamps pink with June.

Herbaria may serve as a means of locating rare or possibly extinct plants. When looking online for information on the Fringed Gentian in my home state of Maryland, I discovered the Maryland Biodiversity Project’s page that included herbarium sheets. Fringed Gentian in Maryland is now on the endangered list due to loss of habitat brought on by explosive development in the Washington DC- Baltimore corrider. The location data from the Fringed Gentian herbarium sheets located in the Norton-Brown Herbarium had been deleted in order to protect the plants. One remaining location is known to the public and is in a state park. Even under that protective care, the Fringed Gentians are being lost through the following reasons: Human activity of trampling, picking flowers, or removing entire plants; deer eating the plants; early frost that kills the plant before it sets its seed; drought or flooding that kills the plants. Fringed Gentians require a particular type of soil, limestone or serpentine, in which to grow. As noted above, those former historic areas are now developed. Even in Emily Dickinson’s day students were taught that the Fringed Gentian was a rarity and that it should be left alone. Yet a single bloom is pressed on page 21 of her herbarium. Dickinson referred to the Fringed Gentian in six of her poems, often using it as an emblem of herself in her vocation as a poet.

A herbarium sheet specimen may contain pollen, useful for taxonomic, systematic and pollination studies. An ongoing project at the Emily Dickinson Museum has students from the Summer Field School of the University of Massachusetts Historical Archaeology program digging on the grounds of the Homestead to find evidence of the species she may have grown as well as the exact garden location. In June of 2017 the archeology students uncovered and excavated an upside down and intact flower pot still full of dirt and containing plant material. The flower pot was carefully removed so that the soil was kept inside it. An archaeobotanist will examine its contents for seeds and pollen for identification. It is hoped that the plant material will be of a hyacinth, thus proving that the flower pot came from Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. Her niece Martha recalled how her Aunt Emily forced a rainbow of hyacinth blooms in order to chase away winter’s gloom each year. The archeobotanist’s discoveries of the flower pot’s contents and other soil samples will add to the knowledge of which species were cultivated or growing in the Amherst area during the 19th century. Perhaps the results will aid in the identification of several unknowns that are preserved in the Dickinson herbarium.

Why did I use metalpoint for this project? Metalpoint drawing is a Renaissance drawing technique utilized by such renowned artists as Leonardo daVinci, Raphael and Albrecht Durer. It is ideal for close observational botanical drawing with its capability for rendering fine lines and its unique tendency to develop a patina over time.

One uses a small piece of silver or other metal wire to make marks on a prepared paper. The paper can be prepared with something as simple as gouache, or a more complex ground can be made from various glues and pigments mixed with either bone ash or marble dust. These grounds have a tooth, and as the metalpoint is drawn over the surface, bits of metal are abraded off initially leaving behind a gray line. Value is built up through hatching and cross hatching. Silver is also highly reflective, lending an ethereal effect to the drawing. During the course of my project these characteristics became a metaphor for a plant’s evolving status: by the plants extirpation due to habitat destruction; its adaption to a changing environment or as a pressed, dried plant became an artifact on a herbarium page.

It has been said that Emily Dickinson’s herbarium contains the seeds of her floral inspired poetry; there are over 550 references to flowers in her writings. Dickinson’s herbarium shows her love of flowers, her horticultural interests and she expresses their language throughout her poetry. Although her herbarium has no great value to science, and to date no written record documenting her finds has been discovered, it remains a silent witness to what was growing in the Amherst area during the years she collected her plants.

Bibliography

The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Thomas H. Johnson, Editor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1958.

OR :The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Mabel Loomis Todd, Editor. Dover Publications, Inc. Public Domain.

The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition. R.W. Franklin, Editor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1999. (Numbers preceded by Fr indicate the poems from this edition)

OR: Poems of Emily Dickinson. Mabel Loomis Todd, T.W. Higginson, Editors. Public Domain; download from the Internet.

Emily Dickinson Herbarium, A Facsimile Edition. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2006. (Harvard has digitized the facsimile; it is over 175 years old and is too fragile to view in person)

Drawing in Silver and Gold, Leonardo to Jasper Johns. Stacey Sell and Hugo Chapman, Editors. National Gallery of Art. Princeton University Press. 2015. (See https://www.nga.gov/ for information on the 2015 show and metalpoint drawing, under the Past Exhibitions heading)

Silverpoint and Metalpoint Drawing: A Complete Guide to the Medium. Susan Schwalb and Tom Mazzullo. Routledge.2019.

Emily Dickinson Museum

280 Main Street,

Amherst, MA 01002

https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/

Poems from the Franklin Edition:

Indian Pipe- Fr1193, Fr 1513

Orchids- Fr31

Fringed Gentian- Fr 21, 26, 520, 1458, 1588, 1710