Before Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) gained her reputation as a leading American poet of the 19th century, she was known by family and friends for her passion in gardening. Barely published during her lifetime, it was her sister who uncovered her poetry posthumously and proceeded to publish it. Born into a family of gardeners, Dickinson tended to a large garden at her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, sending fresh bouquets to friends and family (often with poems attached, known as “nosegays”), and studied botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke. The title of This Earthen Door is derived from Dickinson’s poem “We can but follow to the Sun” (We go no further with the Dust; Than to the Earthen Door—) More than a third of her poems and half of her letters reference flowers and plants.

For This Earthen Door Marchand and Sobsey developed a project rooted in Emily Dickinson’s botanical studies. Using anthotype, a plant-and light-based photographic process invented during Dickinson’s era, the exhibition presents a highly pigmented monochromatic re-imagining of the 66 pages of Dickinson’s herbarium, which contains over 400 different species. Housed in the Houghton Library’s Emily Dickinson Collection at Harvard University, they used photographs of the pages as a basis for their work. Complementing the anthotypes, is a series of chromotaxys, or color classifications, composed of grids of pigment from the juices of 66 flowers, symbolizing their shared properties and poetic associations. These works form the artists’ own 21st century herbarium.

Herbariums are flower scrapbooks made by pressing dried plants into the pages of a book and were a popular pastime in Dickinson’s era. She began hers at 14, representing the extraordinary number of plants she collected from her garden and on walks. In a letter to a friend at the time, Dickinson wrote, “I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter, which you must press for me. Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here.”

In a gesture honoring Dickinson’s effort made more than 180 years ago, and galvanized by the fact that her herbarium is now too delicate for public or private viewing, the artists grew and harvested plants and flowers from their own gardens to remake her sampler. Working in different planting zones in Quebec and North Carolina, the artists were able to bring to life nearly all of Dickinson’s plants in Massachusetts including poppy, daylily, snapdragon, tulip, honeysuckle, dandelion and others.

This Earthen Door encompasses more than three years of work from 2020 - 2023, beginning during the pandemic, when Marchand and Sobsey were sequestered as was Dickinson at her writing desk. As Marchand writes, “Like the time machine that is any herbarium, with its pressed specimens offering a slice of the past, This Earthen Door gives a glimpse into the nature-inspired world of the enigmatic, beloved poet nearly two centuries later – and asks, with today’s ‘plant invisibility’ and climate chaos, where may she point us?”