Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium

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“My plants look finely now. I am going to send you a little geranium leaf, which you must press for me. Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you. ’Most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here . . .”

In May 1845, fourteen-year-old Emily Dickinson wrote these lines to her school friend, Abiah Root. Emily was full of the excitement of discovery and the joy of life—giving no hint of the eccentric recluse she would become in the last decades of her life.

She continued, “I have been to walk tonight and got some very choice wild flowers. . . . I have four studies. They are Mental Philosophy, Geology, Latin and Botany.” She was a student at Amherst Academy in her Massachusetts hometown that year, and the young women were learning to make herbariums by gathering, pressing, mounting, and identifying plants and wildflowers of the area.

In this introduction to the botanical world, Emily learned science and record keeping and honed her powers of observation. She was also experiencing the fleeting beauty and fragility of life, major subjects of her later poetry.

In a letter she wrote to a friend in autumn 1845, Emily sounds like any other gardener who goes out in the dark to gather the last blooms of the season to outwit the frost:

I had a beautiful flower garden this summer, but they are nearly gone now. It is very cold tonight . . . and I mean to pick the prettiest ones before I go to bed. I would love to send you a bouquet if I had an opportunity, and you could press it and write under it, The last flowers of Summer.

Paging through time

Emily assembled sixty-six herbarium pages, with five or more plant specimens on each page. Now more than 150 years old, they survive today in the safekeeping of the Houghton Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Time has ravaged the frail pressed plants, fading the colors to pale sepias. To preserve them, archivists have prepared black-and-white photographs of each page for use by researchers, keeping the originals under lock and key. By special arrangement, I was able to view several folders of the original pages. The pressed flowers are attached to the right-hand page; the left-hand pages are blank and protect the flowers when the folder is closed. The flowers and leaves, which have yielded the last of their color, resemble line drawings.

Emily’s herbarium begins with flair. The specimens on the first page are arranged carefully, obviously with some thought as to design, symmetry, and presentation. A large leaf and flower form the focal point; five smaller plant specimens are displayed around it. The plant parts are affixed to the page with one or more narrow strips of paper glued at each end. (Professional botanists still use this method of attachment, which enables them to remove a specimen from the page for study without damaging it.)

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