This Earthen Door 

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium

Leah Sobsey & Amanda Marchand

Signed copy by Leah Sobsey

This eco-feminist collaboration with artist Leah Sobsey reanimates Emily Dickinson’s herbarium (botanical sampler) in a work of and for our time. The project employs Anthotypes (from the Greek meaning flower), a plant-based photo process invented during Dickinson’s era just as photography was being born. During her life Dickinson was not famous for her poetry, but for her green thumb – she had an extensive garden and was a student of botany. Our project re-makes her 66 herbarium pages with plant pigments from 66 species that we grew and harvested in our own gardens – and that Dickinson grew, among the 400+ herbarium species.

We partnered with scientists/scholars, Dr. Kyra Krakos and Peter Grima, to expand upon Emily’s flower sampler. The color schemas are “data drawings,” abstratct, color compositions, our own 21st-Century herbarium. This second half of the project, is a sumptuous study of color, telling plant stories through Dickinson’s world of flowers. This Earthen Door considers the current state of climate chaos, investigating our connection to nature – and asks where Emily would point us today.