EMILY DICKINSON and HER GARDEN

Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886) poet of my heart and devoted gardener wrote some beautiful observations about her garden, both the one out doors and  the one in her conservatory which exists to this day in her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. The N. Y. Botanical Garden now has an exhibit of her garden complete with the plants that she grew and with some of her poems. From "The Gentian Weaves Her Purple Fringes" we get;
                                                            In the name of the bee--
                                                           And of the Butterfly---
                                                           And of the Breeze---Amen!


She always capitalized nouns and words she wanted to emphasize. I see every Flower in my garden in the early morning with her words, "Every Flower a Resurrection." Try looking at a flower with pure attention, without naming it, without even describing it. Can you do that for even 5 seconds? Can you do that? It's hard for me too. You see it's difficult, but you just might SEE the flower.
That' why she was able to write poems---she could See, and she had writing skills that she developed through constant use.
        Here she is on bees, again;

   Bees are Black, with Gilt Surcingles--
   Buccaneers of Buzz.
   Ride about in ostentation
   And subsist on Fuzz.

Amazing--Buccaneers of Buzz! Amazing! Who of us could say that? Surcingles, means a girth that binds, all proof that Dickinson had a vocabulary, could use words, and had an imaginative mind primarily because she was not "on fire" with the distracting minutia of daily, distractive illusion. She lived right through the American Civil War as her dates show. She felt it, but almost never mentioned it. And, she never read Buddha's "Fire Sermon," but she had it carved somewhere in her Soul.
   "Every flower a resurrection." The hybrid daylilies that my wife and I planted a few years ago are blooming now. What can I say? They neither toil nor spin? They will surely outlast the burning politicians,  You would have to SEE them to appreciate them, the lilies not the politicians. The bees never name them, as far as I know. They simply suck their nectars and buzz on.
   The exhibition of her garden, her only extant dress and her poems is a wonderful show at the NY Botanical Garden, seen by millions on  The Lehrer News Hour, and by Millions daily at the the NYB Garden. Also, her poems, one of them, are on all the adds in the NY City Busses. You know, those add-venues that you sit across from and mindlessly read about wireless phone adds. Pretty good for a girl who got only Five ( 5 out of her 1,300 ) poems published in her lifetime! Yes, five out of 1,300. And, the editor, although very supportive of her work, was a bit afraid or reluctant to publish those five. He said they were too different in diction and rhyme from what his readers expected. (The readers might not understand, nor not like them.) And, Dickinson really didn't care whether they were published or not. She only cared, and was grateful, that she had the poetic apercu that enabled her to write, and so be it. That was her Power.And, she came to realize that, precisely, late in life.
   Also, I am sure that had Emily Dickinson "achieved" Fame she would have gone on living every 'particle' of her life as she always had; caring for her mother, for her brother Austin, for her father, for nephew Nat prior to his tragic early death, being devoted to her sis-in-law Susan next door at "The Evergreens", and of course there was her garden, poetry, and the utterance of witty remarks. One day an officious stranger came to her door and asked if she knew of a place where the rent in town was cheap. Without missing a beat she said to Him, try at the Cemetery, it's for Eternity.