“Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers,
I hear the bright bee hum,
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!”
—Emily Dickinson
An excerpt from Emily Dickinson's poem "There is Another Sky. " In it, she describes a metaphorical garden, a place of perpetual beauty and warmth, and invites her brother to join her, signifying a desire for connection and comfort in a difficult time. A celebrated American poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson was also a prolific gardener. She studied botany, took courses at Amherst and Mount Holyoke, and tended a large garden with a small conservatory attached to the family home. As a teenager, she created a herbarium that lives at the intersection of science, poetry, and art, filled with over 400 pressed plants that she collected from her garden and on walks. Dickinson’s herbarium is housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. It is too fragile to view but has inspired gardeners and artists for decades.
Left to right from top: Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey, Purple – is fashionable – twice, 2023, archival pigment print (made from original anthotype), 30x40 in. Courtesy of the artists and Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC. © Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey; Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey, The Color of the Grave is Green, 2023, archival pigment print (from original plant pigments on paper), 50x40 in. Courtesy of the artists and Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC. © Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey; Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey, Herbarium Plate 54 - Purple Pansy, 2023, archival pigment print (made from original anthotype), 30x40 in. Courtesy of the artists and Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC. © Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey; Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886. Herbarium, circa 1839-1846. 1 volume
What better way to celebrate spring than to visit The Brandywine Museum of Art’s new exhibition, This Earthen Door, on view from May 25, 2025 to September 08, 2025. Curated as an interdisciplinary exhibition, This Earthen Door celebrates the poetic beauty of Emily Dickinson's profound affinity with nature. Through a collection of photographs, Brooklyn artist Amanda Marchand and Chapel Hill artist Leah Sobsey illuminate the vibrant hues of plants and delve into the symbolic significance of flowers in both artistic expression and literature. This ongoing project celebrates the lyrical essence of Dickinson's natural world connections.
Marchand and Sobsey embarked on a mission to cultivate numerous flowering plants in their respective gardens, faithfully recreating the botanical specimens and original layout of 66 pages from Emily Dickinson's herbarium. Using a mortar and pestle, they meticulously extracted pigments from these flowers, which became integral to their artistic process. The artists were inspired by the anthotype photographic process that uses plant-based pigments to create images on photosensitive paper, which was popular during Dickinson's lifetime. Merchand and Sobsey selected specific pages from Dickinson's herbarium, coated the paper with pure colors derived from the plants they grew, and exposed it to sunlight. Utilizing the sun's bleaching effect, this method resulted in ghostly images reminiscent of Dickinson's preserved botanical collection, evocatively alluding to the passage of time. The anthotype photography remains a fascinating example of early photographic experimentation and a connection to natural history and the birth of the photographic medium.
The artists also created several “data drawings” made up of individual paper sheets colored only by the pigment of a single flower — a visual distillation of that flower. Marchand and Sobsey then created various-sized groupings of these sheets, arranged in grids and other patterns, to symbolize their shared properties or poetic associations. Each one of these data drawings is named after a line from Dickinson’s poetry. For example, the 11 colors within the work entitled Because I Could not Stop for Death represent the flowers commonly used as funeral flowers in the Victorian period. This Earthen Door unfolds as a rich exploration of the fleeting nature of beauty, celebrating the vibrant palette of nature's colors and highlighting the intersections of art, poetry, and science.
