Editing Emily Dickinson (section)

=== Posies and poesies ===
Scholar [[Judith Farr]] notes that Dickinson, during her lifetime, "was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet".<ref name="Farr3to6" /> Dickinson studied botany from the age of nine and, along with her sister, tended the garden at Homestead.<ref name="Farr3to6" /> During her lifetime, she assembled a collection of pressed plants in a sixty-six-page leather-bound [[herbarium]]. It contained 424 pressed flower specimens that she collected, classified, and labeled using the [[Linnaean taxonomy|Linnaean]] system.<ref>Habegger (2001), 154.</ref> The Homestead garden was well known and admired locally in its time. It has not survived, but efforts to revive it have begun.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/science/emily-dickinson-lost-gardens.html|title=The Lost Gardens of Emily Dickinson|date=May 17, 2016|website=The New York Times}}</ref> Dickinson kept no garden notebooks or plant lists, but a clear impression can be formed from the letters and recollections of friends and family. Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered "carpets of [[Lily of the Valley|lily-of-the-valley]] and [[Pansy|pansies]], platoons of [[Sweet pea|sweetpeas]], [[Hyacinth (plant)|hyacinths]], enough in May to give all the bees of summer [[dyspepsia]]. There were ribbons of [[peony]] hedges and drifts of [[Narcissus (genus)|daffodils]] in season, [[Calendula|marigolds]] to distraction—a butterfly utopia".<ref name="Parker">Parker, G9.</ref> In particular, Dickinson cultivated scented exotic flowers, writing that she "could inhabit the [[Maluku Islands|Spice Isles]] merely by crossing the dining room to the conservatory, where the plants hang in baskets". Dickinson would often send her friends bunches of flowers with verses attached, but "they valued the posy more than the poetry".<ref name="Parker" />