![]() This defiant aspect of gardening, so foreign to the dominant modern model of the garden as a place of order walled within a lawn-mowed wilderness, is what Michael Pollan explores in a portion of his 2001 classic The Botany of Desire ( public library). (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) Red poppy by Elizabeth Blackwell from A Curious Herbal - the world’s first illustrated encyclopedia of medicinal plants. Gardening as witchcraft for the soul - defying the permissible, magnifying the possible. ![]() In many ways, across epochs and cultures, gardens themselves - and not only the plants grown in them - have served as psychoactive agents profoundly transforming the human experience: gardening as resistance, gardening as growing through grief, gardening as finding the roots of happiness, gardening as “an exercise in supreme attentiveness.” ![]() That same year, she wrote in a poem:Īs a gardener and a poet, ever since she pressed four hundred wildflowers into the teenage herbarium that became her first formal act of composition, Emily Dickinson had an uncommon grasp of how the life of plants and the life of feelings interleave - particularly the forbidden, the subversive, the countercultural. “Oh that beloved witch-hazel,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins in 1876 as she tended to her famous garden, “one loved stalk as hearty as if just placed in the mail by the woods… witch and witching too, to my joyful mind” - her garden, across the hedge from which lived the love of her life, joylessly married to Emily’s brother, absent from Emily’s arms for a quarter century. ![]()
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