Here it is March, wild and full of promise as the poet Emily Dickinson describes it: “When March is and there isn’t / there is a color out there / on the lonely fields / that science cannot grasp / but nature human feels “. The writer, sitting in the verGoing to his home in Amherst, a university city in Massachusetts, he is intoxicated by scents because spring is an olfactory and visual high. He observes, writes, looks for some ideas for the letters, which he accompanies with rare dried flowers. The hedge of peonies is in front of her, the wood behind her: Emily, born in 1830, lives among plants, petals, fruit, solidarity friendships. She is a poet and a gardener, she is a nymph and Flora. So she tells it her, gracefully and marvel, Marta McDowell, professor of Landscape History at the New York Botanical Garden, in the book Emily Dickinson and her gardens. It is a structured green biography as if it were a calendar, a story of plants and flowers, a herbarium enriched with drawings, prints and botanical cards. There is poetry and science, abandonment and care, which can still be seen today by visiting the house, which has become a museum, and the garden.
Countryside life
Emily Dickinson is a poet of passions and pastimes, living in the nature she shares by sending bouquets of flowers to loved ones and compositions of pressed petals to pen pals. After studying botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke, she spends her entire life in her father’s abode indulging in plants and the collection of wild flowers, writing nonstop and without anyone noticing, as long as she is alive, the poetry that arises. copious in letters and diaries. Her fire is called desire: “it is like the seed / struggling in the earth, / convinced that if she favors it / in the long run it will take root”.
The seasons are the Amherst clock: March is “that month of announcements” in the form of crocuses, snowdrops and hyacinths to the carmine tulips. The hedges are ribbons of color and the garden is Emily’s outdoor studio. He did everything he had to do in the spring: the wood was stacked up, the vines and fruit trees pruned, the manure put on the ground, the lawn soil scattered to strengthen the grass: “In May I sow my splendor / it rises one procession after another ».
Garden, vegetable garden and orchard
At the beginning of summer, Emily goes to horticultural exhibitions, trying to bring the Victorian eclecticism to her garden according to which ancient Greek temples or Swiss chalets full of fuchsias were created with flowers. Meanwhile, her father, a lawyer, is elected to the American Congress and her daughter, with her brothers Austin and Vinnie, sometimes goes to Washington. But nothing attracts her as much as her vegetable garden and her garden where she can lean over a Damascus rose or purple irises which, at sunset, are “red dukes for when the sun goes down”. The height of summer is the season of stunning: he writes, also writes a lot on the herbarium of over 400 pages that he will curate over the years: “My garden – like the beach / Indicates that there is – a sea / That is summer / Like these – the pearls / Who carries – like me ». She, even more than a pearl, feels like a daisy, so much so that she often signs herself Daisy. She wanders through fields and woods and she confesses: «The only commandment I have obeyed: ‘look at the lilies’». As in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.
The cancellation in nature is so all-encompassing that, towards the age of 40, it withdraws from social life in an inexorable process to the point of imagining itself as “a house and garden balboa”, like that earth insect that feeds only on small seeds , and is happy.