Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry

 "In an era when the scientific establishment barred and bolted its gates to women, botany allowed Victorian women to enter science through the permissible backdoor of art, most famously in Beatrix Potter’s scientific drawings of mushrooms and Margaret Gatty’s stunning illustrated classification of seaweed. Across the Atlantic, this art-science adventure in botany found an improbable yet impassioned practitioner in one of humanity’s most beloved and influential poets: Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886). 

Long before she began writing poems, Dickinson undertook a rather different yet unexpectedly parallel art of contemplation and composition — the gathering, growing, classification, and pressing of flowers, which she saw as manifestations of the Muse not that dissimilar to poems."

• The Morgan Library's Emily Dickinson exhibition.
• The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, Judith Farr, et al.
• Harvard's complete digitized Dickinson herbarium

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