06/13/2026
Oh Emily Dickinson!
She kept a garden before she kept to her room.
Most people know Emily Dickinson as the woman in white who rarely left the house. What they don't know is that before the seclusion, before the white dresses, before the poems in the drawer — there was a garden. A serious one.
She started pressing flowers as a teenager. By the time she was in her early twenties she had assembled a herbarium of 424 specimens — wildflowers, garden cultivars, things she grew herself and things she found in the fields and woods around Amherst. She mounted them on heavy paper, labeled them in her own handwriting, organized them not by botanical category but by something more like feeling.
The herbarium still exists. You can look at it online. It is one of the most intimate objects I have ever encountered that I have never touched.
Her garden at the Homestead had a conservatory — a glass room built onto the house specifically so she could grow things through the Massachusetts winter. Jasmine. Heliotrope. Ferns. She sent flowers to people she loved, tucked inside letters and poems. To Susan Gilbert next door. To Samuel Bowles. To editors and strangers and friends she'd never meet. The flowers went where she wouldn't.
As she grew more reclusive, the flowers went where she wouldn't.
Both her flowers and her poems served as emissaries for her.
On Thursday, July 9th, we're taking 16 people to stand in that garden.
This is a private experience — not open to the general public. We'll have guided tours of the Homestead and The Evergreens, Emily's brother Austin's house next door. And then something the museum does not offer publicly: an exclusive garden tour of the landscapes of both houses. The hay meadow. The flower beds. The forested Pelham Hills that became the backdrop for her poems.
We will stand where she stood.
Afterward we carpool back to Cottage Street for a light lunch at the shop, a wander through the district, and then settle into the studio for the Dickinson Pressing Workshop — where you'll begin your own handmade herbarium journal and press a glass botanical specimen to take home.
In her exact tradition.
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July 9 · $165 per person · all inclusive
8:30am meet at 32 Cottage Street · home by 4:30
16 places. A few are already spoken for.
If this is your day, claim your seat. Link in bio — or send us a message and we'll get you in.
EmilyDickinson
