Although Emily Dickinson is now considered one of America’s greatest poets, during her lifetime she was better known for her horticultural skills, as Dickinson scholar Judith Farr has observed. From a young age Dickinson was fascinated by the natural world. She enjoyed helping her mother in the gardens that she kept both at the Dickinson Homestead and the house the Dickinson family lived in for several years on North Pleasant Street where Ren’s Mobil Station now stands. During her year at Mary Lyon’s Female Seminary (1847-48), now Mount Holyoke College, she studied botany and made an extensive herbarium, a collection of pressed flowers and plants from the local area, that eventually contained more than 400 specimens. A family friend is said to have commented, “Emily had an uncanny knack of making even the frailest growing things flourish.”

In mid-Victorian America, gardening was considered a more appropriate pastime for women than writing poetry. Dickinson’s passion for gardening — and growing flowers in particular — remained a constant throughout her life, fueling her spiritual and creative energies. Scholars have remarked that for Dickinson, cultivating flowers and writing poetry were closely linked activities. She did not supervise a gardening staff; she worked the earth, the bulbs, seeds and rootstock with her own hands. Her poetry is replete with flowers and with oblique references to the special meanings they held for her. Her letters to friends often mention what she was tending in the garden.

When her father, Edward Dickinson, moved the family back into the Homestead in 1855, when Emily was 25 years old, he built a small conservatory (essentially a greenhouse) onto the house so that Emily could pursue her gardening passion during the cold winter months. The conservatory, a six-by-18-foot space with south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, was placed between the Homestead’s library and dining room and heated with the dining room’s Franklin stove. Dickinson sometimes wrote at a desk near the entrance to the conservatory, presumably drawing inspiration from the plants she grew there.

In this conservatory, Dickinson, who called herself “a Lunatic on Bulbs” cultivated a wide variety of spring-flowering bulbs including crocuses, fritillaria and hyacinths to bloom months before their outdoor counterparts. She treasured simple wildflowers such as violets, arbutus and buttercups and kept them growing throughout the winter. Alongside these humble plants, Dickinson cultivated exotic flowers from semi-tropical or tropical climates such as Brazil and Ceylon that she read about in magazines. The poet grew gardenias, oleanders, jasmine and other tender plants that had been introduced to America just a few decades earlier. In a March 1866 letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland, she wrote, “My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.”

Garden conservatories were nothing new in Dickinson’s time. The first conservatories were built in Europe in the 16th century, after seafaring explorers brought citrus fruits from warmer climates to Europe, much to the culinary delight of the gentry. When wealthy landowners wanted to grow their own lemons and oranges, they built simple pergolas and other outdoor structures to protect the fruit trees in cold winter months. Gradually, the buildings became more efficient, with sloping glass windows and glass ceilings to allow more sunlight.

In Italy, these structures were called limonaia, for the lemon trees they housed. In France, where oranges were especially popular, they were called orangeries. Louis XIV’s grand Orangerie at Versailles was built between 1684 and 1686, before work on the Sun King’s chateau had even begun. The citrus trees were grown in giant boxes and pots in the garden that could be wheeled into the enclosure in winter. The famous orangerie in Paris was built in 1852 to shelter tender citrus plants grown in the neighboring Tuileries garden. It was turned into an exhibition space for art in the 1920s, decorated by Claude Monet, and became the Musée de l’Orangerie, a museum for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

As gardening became a popular avocation of the well-to-do in 19th-century Europe, conservatories became commonplace in garden practice. The proliferation of conservatories was also due to the importation of hundreds of exotic plants from South America and Asia that could not withstand cold northern winters. Posh gardeners prided themselves on their talent at growing hothouse flowers. Most of Europe’s most spectacular conservatories were built in England, foremost among them the Palm House at Kew Gardens (1844) and the Crystal Palace, built for London’s Great Exhibition in 1851. Conservatories likewise became more numerous in 19th-century America; many of these, like Dickinson’s, were connected to the main house and served as conduits to the outdoor garden.

In 1916, the Homestead was sold and its new owners tore down the conservatory. Fortunately, several of its key features were saved, including three window sashes, shutters, a door and a large granite slab that served as part of the foundation. Nearly 100 years later, the Emily Dickinson Museum set out to rebuild the conservatory exactly as it had existed in Dickinson’s time. This was a long painstaking project, beginning in 2015 with digging by a team from the University of Massachusetts Center for Archaeological Services to locate the precise location and dimensions of the conservatory. The excavation uncovered materials from the original construction, including wood fragments, nails and a brass door lock, and pieces of broken crockery.

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In her book “The Gardens of Emily Dickinson,” Judith Farr demonstrates that Dickinson’s poetry cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the poet’s passion for her gardens, indoors and out. The reconstructed conservatory allows us to see and smell the flowers that inspired Dickinson’s creative genius throughout the cold New England winter.

Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer whose new book, “The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir,” has recently been published by White River Press.