Dickinson adored the plant kingdom from a young age. She recalled going on “rambles” through the woods in her teenage years and finding many “beautiful children of spring,” her epithet for wildflowers like trailing arbutus, adder’s tongue and yellow violets. In her youth, she began composing a book — not of poems, but of plants. She meticulously dried and flattened a wide range of species — chestnut, dogwood, poppies, lilac, nasturtiums, even a couple of algae — and artfully fixed them to paper, christening many with the appropriate Latin names.

“Have you made an herbarium yet?” she wrote to her friend Abiah Root. “I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you.” Eventually, her collection contained more than 400 plants. Around the same time, while at Amherst Academy, Dickinson studied botany.

From her 30s on, Dickinson spent most of her time in and around her family’s sizable property, where she could wander over several acres of meadow, admire pines, oaks and elms, and help tend the orchard. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece, recalled grape trellises, honeysuckle arbors, a summerhouse thatched with roses, and long flower beds with “a mass of meandering blooms” — daffodils, hyacinths, chrysanthemums, marigolds, peonies, bleeding heart and lilies, depending on the season. The Dickinsons also grew Greville roses, which open with a shout of purple and fade to a whisper of pink, and cinnamon or love-for-a-day roses, which “flare and fall between sunrise and sunset,” according to Bianchi. When autumn’s final flowers and showers of spicy foliage disappeared beneath a cloak of snow, Dickinson continued gardening in her glass bubble of perpetual summer.

Dickinson’s expertise in botany and gardening profoundly shaped her poetry. As Farr wrote, her gardens “often provided her with the narratives, tropes, and imagery she required.” In her 1,789 poems, Dickinson refers to plants nearly 600 times and names more than 80 varieties, sometimes by genus or species. In her more than 350 references to flowers, the rose is most frequent, but Dickinson was also fond of humble plants like dandelions, clover and daisies. She used the latter two as symbols for herself in letters and poems. “The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness,” she wrote. “I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass our own.”

Many of Dickinson’s poems refer directly to the idiosyncrasies of her gardens. She wrote of struggling to raise grapes and maize “on the Bleakness of my Lot.” These are not just metaphors; the Dickinsons grew grapes and corn in sometimes unyielding New England soil. In other poems and letters, she refers to “my little damask maid” and “Sweet Sultans,” which were not servants and royalty, but the intoxicatingly pungent Damask rose and a pomponlike relative of the sunflower. Scholars who do not share Dickinson’s intimacy with plants and garden phenomena have occasionally misinterpreted her poems, conflating her lyrical depictions of frost and dew, or mistaking a butterfly for snow.