Botanical garden features poet's favorite flowers

NEW YORK - They're growing dandelions at the New York Botanical Garden. On purpose.

The Edenic estate in the Bronx has mounted an exhibition called "The Poetry of Flowers." It focuses on the 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson, whose verse and letters described blossoms of all kinds and who was better known, when she lived, as a gardener than as a poet.

It's a wide-ranging, indoor and outdoor springtime show, incorporating a breathtaking display of flowering plants in the Enid A. Haupt conservatory, a collection of 60 Dickinson-related artifacts in a gallery and dozens of outdoor stations that highlight her poems in the midst of the flowers she celebrated.

The Poetry Society of America, which turns 100 this year, is a co-presenter.

The flower garden installed in the giant glass conservatory is designed to resemble the grounds of Dickinson's home in Amherst, Mass., by including the flowers she favored, based on her poems and letters.

"We don't know exactly what her garden looked like, but we know lots and lots of the plants she had," said Francisca Coelho, who's in charge of the conservatory. "And there were plenty of ideas in what she wrote."

Describing a red tulip's emergence from its underground bulb, Dickinson wrote:

"She slept beneath a tree -

Remembered but by me.

I touched her Cradle mute -

She recognized the foot -

Put on her Carmine suit

And see!"

The display includes windowed facades meant to look like Dickinson's own home and her brother's next door, and there's a representation of the poet's bedroom with a window providing a view like the one she had.

That view includes the weedy dandelion, whose coarse leaves

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