Did You Know Emily Dickinson Made a Herbarium as a Teenager?

Emily Dickinson is often introduced through her poems, her white dresses, and the quiet rooms of the Amherst home where she spent much of her life. But one of the most revealing objects connected with her is not a poem. It is a green album filled with pressed plants.

During her school years, Dickinson assembled a herbarium—a book of dried botanical specimens. The finished volume contains 424 specimens arranged on 66 leaves. Each plant is attached to the page and identified in Dickinson’s own neat handwriting by its scientific, or Latin, name. The album is now preserved at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, where it can be studied through a digital facsimile because the original is extremely fragile. Harvard Library describes the collection and the herbarium, while the Emily Dickinson Museum explains the album’s place in her school years.

That is the “did you know?” fact: before she was known as one of America’s most distinctive poets, Emily Dickinson made a careful teenage book of plants.

A school project that became a life record

The herbarium dates to about 1839–1846, when Dickinson was a student at Amherst Academy. The Emily Dickinson Museum notes that she also took botany courses at Amherst Academy and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The finished album includes plants native to, naturalized in, or cultivated around western Massachusetts, as well as houseplants.

It is tempting to describe the volume as a secret preview of the poet she would become. That would go further than the evidence allows. A herbarium was a recognizable pastime among girls and young women in the period, not an eccentric invention unique to Dickinson. The museum preserves a letter she wrote to her friend Abiah Root in 1845, when Dickinson was fourteen: “I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter,” she wrote, asking whether Root had made an herbarium and offering to add flowers from around Amherst.

The letter gives the album a social setting. Dickinson was not collecting plants in isolation from the world around her. She was participating in a shared school-age activity, exchanging specimens and ideas with a friend. The book is a personal object, but it also belongs to a network of classmates, teachers, gardens, letters, and nearby landscapes.

That distinction matters when we preserve family stories. A keepsake rarely tells only one story. A pressed flower may record the person who picked it, but also the friend who received it, the school lesson that gave it a name, the house where it grew, and the custom that made saving it seem worthwhile.

What makes the album so striking?

First, it combines observation with arrangement. Dickinson did not simply keep loose flowers in a drawer. She created a finished book. The specimens are attached to pages, and each page has a label. The Harvard Gazette’s account of the 2006 facsimile edition reports that the 424 specimens are held on 66 leaves and that the pages identify the plants by scientific name.

Second, the labels show a young person learning a system. A Latin name is more than a decorative caption. It connects a particular plant to a method of classification and to the formal study Dickinson encountered in school. The album therefore preserves more than the appearance of flowers. It records how she was being taught to look at the natural world.

Third, the book is wonderfully specific. “Emily loved nature” is a broad biographical sentence. A page showing a particular plant, attached in a particular way, with a particular name in a particular hand, is evidence of a habit. It lets us see attention taking physical form.

This is one reason objects can be so useful in memoir and family history. A general description of someone’s personality may be affectionate but difficult to verify. An object can give the story an anchor: the recipe card with substitutions written in the margin, the toolbox with a missing handle, the school notebook filled with diagrams, or the album whose labels reveal what a young person was learning.

A book made by a young Emily, not a symbol invented later

The herbarium has attracted interpretation because Dickinson later became famous for poems filled with gardens, seasons, insects, weather, and the changing life of the natural world. Those connections can be interesting, but they should remain interpretations. The album itself is the firmer ground.

We can say that Dickinson made the herbarium during her school years. We can say that it contains more than 400 pressed specimens, that the finished volume holds 424 specimens on 66 leaves, and that the plants are labelled with scientific names. We can say that a surviving 1845 letter places the activity among her friendships and school-age interests. We should be more careful about claiming that the herbarium directly caused a particular poem or that every plant carried a private symbolic meaning.

Careful language does not make the story less interesting. It makes the object more trustworthy. The album does not need to be turned into a prophecy. It is already a remarkable record of a teenager learning, collecting, arranging, and corresponding with a friend.

The same discipline helps with family memories. If a relative’s old suitcase survives, we can record what the family knows about its owner and journey. We can also mark what is inferred from its scratches, labels, or contents. “Grandmother took this on her first trip overseas” is different from “We think this may be the suitcase she used.” Both statements may belong in the record, but they should not be presented as equally certain.

The people behind the specimen

The herbarium also invites questions that the album cannot answer by itself. Who helped Dickinson identify the plants? Did a teacher assign the work, or did a friend’s example encourage her? Which specimens came from the family garden, and which came from walks or school grounds? Did Dickinson discuss particular pages with Abiah Root or other classmates?

Some of these questions may have answers in letters, school records, family papers, or botanical research. Others may remain open. Leaving a question open is part of honest preservation. A future reader may discover a useful clue, and an uncertain detail can prevent later generations from mistaking a family theory for a documented fact.

There is also a quiet emotional fact in the object’s survival. Dickinson’s poems and letters are now read around the world, but this album preserves the physical scale of her attention: a leaf, a strip of paper, a handwritten name, a page turned by hand. It brings her life closer to the ordinary work of keeping something because it mattered.

That ordinary work is familiar. Families save ticket stubs, pressed flowers, report cards, shopping lists, recipe books, pressed leaves, and notes in coat pockets. Years later, the item may look self-explanatory while its context has vanished. Who saved it? When? What did it mean then? What did the person call it? What did they never write down because everyone in the family supposedly knew?

Try making a small family herbarium

You do not need rare plants or specialist knowledge to borrow the spirit of Dickinson’s project. Choose a safe, legal, and ordinary subject: leaves from a garden, fallen leaves from a walk, or photographs of plants that should not be picked. Create one page for each item and record:

• the date and place;
• the common name, if known;
• who found or grew it;
• what was happening that day;
• what is documented and what is only remembered;
• one question for a future reader.

The point is not to imitate a nineteenth-century school exercise perfectly. It is to connect an object with the human circumstances around it. A leaf without a story may survive in a box, but a leaf with a name, place, date, and remembered companion can become a small family archive.

If writing feels like too much work, record the account aloud first. Memory Share’s guide to creating memoirs explains how a voice recording can become a written memory that you can review and edit later. Add the object or image, identify the people involved, and keep uncertainty visible rather than filling every gap with a confident guess.

Emily Dickinson’s herbarium is memorable not because it predicts her fame, but because it preserves a young person’s attention in material form. It shows a student learning names, sharing a pastime, and making a book carefully enough for it to outlast her. Your family’s objects may be less famous, but they can carry the same kind of evidence: this mattered to someone, and someone took the time to save it.

What ordinary object from your teenage years would reveal how you were learning to see the world?

Sources and further reading

• Emily Dickinson Museum: Herbarium
• Harvard Library: The Emily Dickinson Collection
• Harvard Gazette: HU Press publishes poet Emily Dickinson’s childhood herbarium