The Emily Dickinson Flower

In late spring 2012, we lodged at Amherst in a farm whose owner had once been a gardener at the nearby Emily Dickinson house. She had grown flowers from the Emily Dickinson house herself and gave us one as a present. For one year, we took care for that fragile plant which had been a bit shocked at first by the transport in the hot car. Now, after a year living in the best spot at the herb garden, it has blossomed. We call it our "Emily Dickinson flower". We like Dickinson because of her independence, creativity, and because she can be read and interpreted from many different angles. All her poems on gutenberg.org [TXT]. Even so her poems appear clear at first, there often remains an enigma. Dickinson with her short poems is a very modern poet. As if she had anticipated and written them for our fast, impatient and twitter-esque time. Here are two of her poems on flowers:

With a flower:

I hide myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too --
And angels know the rest.
I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness.

With flowers:

If recollecting were forgetting,
Then I remember not;
And if forgetting, recollecting,
How near I had forgot!
And if to miss were merry,
And if to mourn were gay,
How very blithe the fingers
That gathered these to-day!

The photo to the right shows the primrose which has an ancestor which had been tended by Emily Dickinson herself. So, a little bit of Emily is now with us in our garden. "I hide myself within my flower ..."

Oliver Knill, Back to my random page collection

Purple red colored Primula veris (cowslip) Photo: April 28, 2013. Click on the photo to see it large. Herbarium of Emily (1839-1846) at Houghton Library. PDF.

The plant gets stronger: Photo: May 11, 2014.
Update of May 5th, 2020: I like to run these days often to the Mary Cummings ParkM a nice area given to the public by Mary Cummings (1839-1927). An example is the 18 K round trip running around Whipple Hill, Zion Hill, and the Cummings park. There are many variants possible, like cutting through the park. These days they renovate the park and there are many stones around which have shiny crystalline parts. The last couple of runs, I have taken a little stone from there. Some look like granite, some like Feldspar. The Geology map indicates Granite. They decorates now the Emily Dickinson flower. Emily lived (1839-1886), which is within the time interval of Mary Cummings. Now the stones of Mary Cummings and the flower of Emily Dickinson are together in our garden. Here is a photo of May 5, 2020:

The Emily Dickinson flower and the Mary Cumming stones.