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By MICKEY RATHBUN

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.”

By MICKEY RATHBUN

The word “herbarium” sounds a bit quaint, even antiquated. We may think of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, which she created during her year at Mount Holyoke in 1847-48. Although she had begun studying plants at age 9 and was helping her mother in the...

By ALEXANDER MACDOUGALL

The Pioneer Valley’s most famous poet, it turns out, has a genealogical connection to the the modern world’s most famous singer-songwriter.In a segment on NBC’s “Today Show” on Monday, the genealogy website Ancestry.com revealed that Emily Dickinson...

By STEVE PFARRER

Between the “Dickinson” series on Apple TV+ and movies such as 2016’s “A Quiet Passion,” interest in Emily Dickinson has grown in the last several years, even beyond the already intense admiration that existed for her poetry among readers and literary...

By STEVE PFARRER

AMHERST — Closed since 2019 for extensive preservation efforts and infrastructure improvements, The Evergreens, a key property at the Emily Dickinson Museum, will reopen for visitors March 1.The 19th century house was built in 1856 for Austin...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — The Amherst Historical Commission is supporting an application for historic state tax credits for the renovation and expansion of the Jones Library, even with some changes being made to interior spaces of the original 1928 building.The...

The poet Emily in the Paper CityHOLYOKE — MIFA Victory Theatre is combining forces with the Emily Dickinson Museum and a New York theater company for a fresh look at The Belle of Amherst and her poetic legacy.“Because I Could Not Stop: An Encounter...

By STEVE PFARRER

It might seem that every conceivable angle of studying Emily Dickinson has been covered, and in just about every format: biographies, academic studies, poetry analysis, novels, movies, even TV shows.Yet the famed Amherst poet always seems to inspire a...