J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

Fourteen-year-old Emily Dickinson learned how to make a herbarium at Amherst Academy in a course on botany. The volume contains more than four hundred pressed plant specimens carefully arranged on sixty-six pages, each labeled with the plant's Latin name along with numbers indicating the botanical class and order within the genus of each species as outlined in Amos Eaton's Manual of Botany for North America, all written in what is, for Dickinson, an uncharacteristically neat hand.¹ This curious object is undeniably "exquisite."² But it's also tantalizingly perplexing. It contains very few words, almost none in English.³ It contains no poetry and was likely produced as a school assignment for class. At first glance, the herbarium offers scant connection to the wild and wonderful poetry Dickinson began writing just a few years later. Even as astute a Dickinson scholar as Virginia Jackson is left baffled by what to do with the herbarium. In her review of the 2006 facsimile edition, she asks, "For whom, or for what reason, has this collection of pressed and labeled flora been made public? Beautiful as it is, who will buy it (at $125.00) and who will read—or view—it?"⁴

Perhaps its beauty is reason enough. Each page shows an innate understanding of composition and visual rhythm. Although each flower and leaf has been squashed into a flat, two-dimensional object through the process of pressing, the care (and, dare we say, love?) with which Dickinson placed each specimen in the press preserves the graceful arc of stems and highlights unusual leaf forms or contrasts between leaf and flower. This attention to visual arrangement is perhaps what most immediately distinguishes Dickinson's herbarium from those of contemporaries [End Page 239] like Samuel Shaw, who made his as a student at nearby Amherst College in 1854, or Henry David Thoreau, who began making his herbarium in 1853.⁵ Theirs are workmanlike collections of materials whose intent is to organize information. Dickinson's, arguably, is a work of art.

But it is possible to do more than simply revel in its beauty. One can actually read a page like this, just as one would read a Dickinson poem: slowly and deeply, uncovering its multilayered resonances. Reading the herbarium not only allows us a glimpse into the workings of Dickinson's mind, where we might get a sense of her interests, preoccupations, and perhaps, her prejudices; it also provides an opportunity to understand the complex relationship between people and plants that is both ecological and historical, both material and conceptual.

But what is a herbarium, anyway? At its core, a herbarium is a catalog or library of plants. The first known examples were created in Pisa in the sixteenth century by scientist Luca Ghini and his students; two centuries later, English scientist Hans Sloane's enormous herbarium, totaling 265 volumes of specimens from more than seventy countries on five continents, became the basis of the British Museum.⁶ In the nineteenth century, making herbaria became a popular leisure activity and a part of university and secondary science education in the United States, including at schools for girls and young women.

Containing specimens collected in different places and at different times (across the span of a lifetime or a historical period, and also over the range of seasons), the herbarium is a genre marked by temporality. Yet because a herbarium might be assembled months or even years after specimens were gathered and pressed, it cannot be "read" sequentially. Botanist Ray Angelo notes that Dickinson's herbarium further confounds temporal or sequential reading because she combines on a single page species that bloom at different times of year—spring and fall, for example.

Dickinson violates what is considered good botanical practice by including different species on a single page, rather than restricting each page to a single species (both Thoreau and Shaw organized their herbaria in the preferred fashion). She also does not include complete specimens (i.e., with leaf, inflorescence, stem, and root), privileging blooms and foliage to the exclusion of almost everything else. This particular botanical shortcoming may...