The Gardens of Emily Dickinson

By Judith Farr

Book Overview

In this first substantial study of Emily Dickinson's devotion to flowers and gardening, Judith Farr seeks to join both poet and gardener in one creative personality. She casts new light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility, and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality. Gardening, Farr demonstrates, was Dickinson's other vocation, more public than the making of poems but analogous and closely related to it. Over a third of Dickinson's poems and nearly half of her letters allude with passionate intensity to her favorite wildflowers, to traditional blooms like the daisy or gentian, and to the exotic gardenias and jasmines of her conservatory. Each flower was assigned specific connotations by the nineteenth century floral dictionaries she knew; thus, Dickinson's association of various flowers with friends, family, and lovers, like the tropes and scenarios presented in her poems, establishes her participation in the literary and painterly culture of her day. A chapter, "Gardening with Emily Dickinson" by Louise Carter, cites family letters and memoirs to conjecture the kinds of flowers contained in the poet's indoor and outdoor gardens. Carter hypothesizes Dickinson's methods of gardening, explaining how one might grow her flowers today. Beautifully illustrated and written with verve, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson will provide pleasure and insight to a wide audience of scholars, admirers of Dickinson's poetry, and garden lovers everywhere. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Gardening in Eden 2. The Woodland Garden 3. The Enclosed Garden 4. The "Garden in the Brain" 5. Gardening with Emily Dickinson Louise Carter Epilogue: The Gardener in Her Seasons Appendix: Flowers and Plants Grown by Emily Dickinson Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index of Poems Cited Index Reviews of this book: In this first major study of our beloved poet Dickinson's devotion to gardening, Farr shows us that like poetry, gardening was her daily passion, her spiritual sustenance, and her literary inspiration...Rather than speaking generally about Dickinson's gardening habits, as other articles on the subject have done, Farr immerses the reader in a stimulating and detailed discussion of the flowers Dickinson grew, collected, and eulogized...The result is an intimate study of Dickinson that invites readers to imagine the floral landscapes that she saw, both in and out of doors, and to re-create those landscapes by growing the same flowers (the final chapter is chock-full of practical gardening tips). --Maria Kochis, Library Journal Reviews of this book: This is a beautiful book on heavy white paper with rich reproductions of Emily Dickinson's favorite flowers, including sheets from the herbarium she kept as a young girl. But which came first, the flowers or the poems? So intertwined are Dickinson's verses with her life in flowers that they seem to be the lens through which she saw the world. In her day (1830-86), many people spoke 'the language of flowers.' Judith Farr shows how closely the poet linked certain flowers with her few and beloved friends: jasmine with editor Samuel Bowles, Crown Imperial with Susan Gilbert, heliotrope with Judge Otis Lord and day lilies with her image of herself. The Belle of Amherst, Mass., spent most of her life on 14 acres behind her father's house on Main Street. Her gardens were full of scented flowers and blossoming trees. She sent notes with nosegays and bouquets to neighbors instead of appearing in the flesh. Flowers were her messengers. Resisting digressions into the world of Dickinson scholarship, Farr stays true to her purpose, even offering a guide to the flowers the poet grew and how to replicate her gardens. --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Cuttings from the book: "The pansy, like the anemone, was a favorite of Emily Dickinson because it came up early, announcing the longed-for spring, and, as a type of bravery, could withstand cold and even an April snow flurry or two in her Amherst garden. In her poem the pansy announces itself boldly, telling her it has been 'resoluter' than the 'Coward Bumble Bee' that loiters by a warm hearth waiting for May." "She spoke of the written word as a flower, telling Emily Fowler Ford, for example, 'thank you for writing me, one precious little "forget-me-not" to bloom along my way.' She often spoke of a flower when she meant herself: 'You failed to keep your appointment with the apple-blossoms,' she reproached her friend Maria Whitney in June 1883, meaning that Maria had not visited her . . . Sometimes she marked the day or season by alluding to flowers that had or had not bloomed: 'I said I should send some flowers this week . . . [but] my Vale Lily asked me to wait for her.'" "People were also associated with flowers . . . Thus, her loyal, brisk, homemaking sister Lavinia is mentioned in Dickinson's letters in concert with sweet apple blossoms and sturdy chrysanthemums . . . Emily's vivid, ambitious sister-in-law Susan Dickinson is mentioned in the company of cardinal flowers and of that grand member of the fritillaria family, the Crown Imperial."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674012933
• ISBN13: 9780674012936
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Award Winning Prose

This scholarly, beautiful and original book by Judith Farr, with Louise Carter, also won the 2005 Rosemary Crawshay prize, awarded by the British Academy, United Kingdom, "to a woman of any nationality who, in the judgement of the Council of the British Academy, has written or published within three years next preceding the year of the award an historical or critical work of sufficient value on any subject connected with English Literature, preference being given to a work regarding one of the poets Byron, Shelley and Keats".

"Beauty crowds me till I die"

Emily Dickinson continues to fascinate the literary world, not only because of her unique, eerily beautiful poetry, but also because of the delicious mystery that cocoons her life well over one hundred years after her death. Some have painted her as a looney eccentric, some as a recluse shrouded in sexual ecstasy: she has been seen on theatre stages throughout the world as the Belle of Amherst, and her works have been incorporated into songs and symphonies - the most poignant being John Adams' "Harmonium".Yet few investigators have the quaint, informed pique as the highly admired Dickinson scholar, Judith Farr. This book THE GARDENS OF EMILY DICKINSON maintains the level of biographic study that began with her THE PASSION OF EMILY DICKINSON in 1994 and continued with the elegant, aptly eccentric epistolary novel I NEVER CAME TO YOU IN WHITE in 1996. Like the previous books, Farr does not confine her writing to academia (though she obviously has consumed every bit of available information on her subject and footnoted these books extensively): Farr prefers to open doors and windows of imagination to make the factual data supplied have a semblance to the radiance of Dickinson's gifts to posterity.During Emily Dickinson's lifetime (1830 - 1886) the poet was better know for her commitment to the oh-so-proper Victorian art of gardening. Books on Botany from that period held dominion over reading tables and bookshelves and Dickinson was as astute a garden scholar as the best of them. Flowers are frequently referenced in her poetry, her letters, her life, and Farr has used this other half of Dickinson's life as a means to explore the meanings of her poems. 'Flowers - Well - if anybody/Can extasy define -/Half a transport - half a trouble -/With which flowers humble men:...' She divides her writings into chapters 'Gardening in Eden' (the more spiritual aspect of the garden), 'The Woodland Garden' (the exploration of her natural garden on the grounds of the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts), 'The Enclosed Garden' (the conservatory where exotic looms were coddled), and 'The Garden in the Brain'. In each of these chapters Farr takes almost every reference to flowers in Dickinson's poems and discusses their significance both herbally and philosophically and passionately. The characters that played significant roles in Dickinson's odd life are all addressed (Susan Dickinson, Bowles, Higginson, etc) by referencing letters to and poems about each , and each bit of evidence breathes floral dimensions. Almost as an intermission to this theatrical diversion, Farr has placed a chapter by Louise Carter "Gardening with Emily Dickinson" which is well written and serves to ground the ongoing growing tales of the Belle of Amherst with a sophisticated diversion on the techniques of the Victorian Gardener - a chapter which could easily find its way into all Garden books! And aptly, in a manner that would no doubt find Dickinson's approval, Farr ends her book wit

Another Tour de Force from Judith Farr

Judith Farr is the preeminent Emily Dickson scholar alive today. This is a worthy companion to The Passion of Emily Dickson, also published by Harvard Press. If you are unfamiliar with Farr's work and love Emily Dickinson, you owe it to yourself to read both works. Farr's insights are bold, well-defended and entirely convincing. Her writing is crisp, direct and immensely readable. Also, this is without a doubt one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen in presentation. The color plates are worth the price of the book alone. Better than 5 stars.