The Significance of Jasmine: Emily Dickinson's Herbarium Revealed

At Brainpickings, Maria Popova writes that she first encountered Dickinson's gorgeous herbarium at the Morgan Library, as part of its current exhibition, I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson created her herbarium, a book of pressed, dried flowers, when she was eight or nine. Popova writes, that it's "a masterpiece of uncommon punctiliousness and poetic beauty: 424 flowers from the Amherst region, which Dickinson celebrated as 'beautiful children of spring,' arranged with a remarkable sensitivity to scale and visual cadence across sixty-six pages in a large leather-bound album." Let's start there:

Slim paper labels punctuate the specimens like enormous dashes inscribed with the names of the plants — sometimes colloquial, sometimes Linnaean — in Dickinson’s elegant handwriting.

What emerges is an elegy for time, composed with passionate patience, emanating the same wakefulness to sensuality and morality that marks Dickinson’s poetry.

Although the original herbarium survives in the Emily Dickinson Room at Harvard’s Houghton Rare Book Library, it is so fragile that even scholars are prohibited from examining it and the out-of-print facsimile book is so prohibitively expensive that this miraculous masterpiece at the intersection of poetry and science has practically vanished from the popular imagination. But in a heartening testament to the digital humanities as a force of cultural stewardship, Harvard has digitized Dickinson’s herbarium in its totality.

Judith Farr discusses the herbarium in her altogether wonderful book The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (public library), in which she writes:

The photo facsimiles of the herbarium now available to readers at the Houghton Library still present the girl Emily appealingly: the one who misspelled, who arranged pressed flowers in artistic form, who with Wordsworthian tenderness considered nature her friend.

One of the most aesthetically dramatic pages in the herbarium features eight different kinds of violet, a flower Dickinson cherished above others for the “unsuspected” splendor with which it ambushed the meadow-wanderer.

View samples from Emily Dickinson's herbarium at Brainpickings.