Wild Sarsaparilla—Hepatica—Mullein

The older I grow, the more do I love spring and spring flowers. Is it so with you? While at home there were several pleasure parties of which I was a member, and in our rambles we found many and beautiful children of spring, which I will mention and see if you have found them, —the trailing arbutus, adder's tongue, yellow violets, liver-leaf, blood-root, and many other smaller flowers.
—Emily Dickinson to Abiah Palmer Root, May 16, 1848


In the mid-1840s, as Dr. Mead was collecting and exchanging plant specimens with his botanical correspondents, Emily Dickinson was collecting and pressing flowers for her own personal herbarium. Like Dr. Mead, she also exchanged plants with her correspondents. In May 1845, when she was fifteen, she wrote to her school friend Abiah Root: “My plants look finely now. I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter, which you must press for me. Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; ’most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some addition to it from the flowers growing around here.” In the same letter, she tells her friend that she received from Miss Adams, “a beautiful little bunch of pressed flowers which I value very much as they were from her.”

Unlike Dr. Mead, Emily Dickinson’s interest in plants was not primarily scientific. Flowers for her were expressions of friendship and affection, and like her poems were offerings of her self. The poems she sent to friends were often accompanied by flowers or small bouquets. Flowers had personal associations for her, evoking memories or providing inspiration or providing a connection with absent friends. In another letter to Abiah, from May 1852, Dickinson recalls an occasion at school when Abiah arrived for an assembly “bedecked with dandelions.” She writes: “Oh, Abiah, you and the early flower are forever linked to me; as soon as the first green grass comes, up from a chink in the stones peeps the little flower, precious ‘leontodon,’ and my heart fills toward you with a warm childlike fullness! Nor do I laugh now; far from it, I rather bless the flower which sweetly, slyly too, makes me come nearer you.”

In her herbarium, although most of the specimens are labeled with the correct scientific name, the plants are arranged not according to genus or any discernible scientific criterion. They seem to be arranged more for artistic effect, or based on associations—like the association of the dandelion with her friend Abiah—known only to herself. On the page, her arrangments of plants are like her poems—the striking images and unexpected juxtapositions, the simplicity and mystery.

On one page, three entirely unrelated plants: wild sarsaparilla (aralia nudicaulis), hepatica (hepatica americana), and common mullein (verbascum thapsus). The plants are members of different families, bloom at different times of the year, and are found in different settings—wild sarsaparilla and hepatica are woodland species, but mullein grows in open areas. At the top of the page, she has arranged three stalks from the wild sarsaparilla, each with three flower clusters at the top. The three stalks are crossed like swords. The hepatica in the lower left has three flowers and one three-lobed leaf. The page seems to be arranged according to groups of three—except for the mullein, of which there is only a single flower and a single leaf.

I have spent a long time looking at this page. It’s impossible to know what these individual flowers meant to Emily Dickinson, or why she chose to place them together on the same page. One of the things that strikes me is that she didn’t scorn common weeds like mullein. Like the dandelion, which reminded her of her friend Abiah, even a weed like mullein may have had special associations for her. They were in any case part of the landscape of home, familiar fellow inhabitants of the area around Amherst and South Hadley where she did her collecting. Her arrangement of the mullein is particularly striking. A mullein plant in the field is often two meters tall, a single stalk dense with velvet leaves terminating in a long spike of densely-packed yellow flowers that pop unevenly into bloom. I have never found it particularly attractive or interesting. But Emily Dickinson took a single leaf and a single flower, and arranged them in a way that doesn’t at all suggest a mullein. It’s as if she had made something new of them, or at least made me look at mullein differently.

The single flower and single leaf, abstracted from a plant that contains a multitude of leaves and flowers, reminds me of the poet’s interest in singularity, and her fondness for the word “one.” Often, as I walk in the prairie, I think of her lines: “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee. / One clover and a bee.” Although an actual prairie, like a mullein plant, contains multitudes, Dickinson focuses on a single clover and a single bee. In another poem, she writes that “the soul selects her own society”—

I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

With this poem in mind, I imagine young Emily Dickinson choosing one leaf and one flower from the “ample nation” of the mullein to press and mount in her herbarium. I look again at the three stalks of the wild sarsaparilla, each with three flower clusters made of dozens of individual flowers, and at the three flowers of the hepatica. There seems to be a kind of floral subtraction at work. I think of how, at the time when she made her herbarium, she was often surrounded by her school friends, and how in years to come she would retreat into solitude.

I realize I’m reading an entire biography into a single page of dried flowers, but “revery alone will do,/If bees are few.”