2026 Bulb Show Opening Lecture with Botanist Peter Grima
Botanic Garden
Friday, March 6, 2026 7:30-8:30 p.m.
Emily Dickinson: Western Mass Botanist
Emily Dickinson's herbarium is a beautiful and fascinating collection of 424 pressed plants, exhibiting the same kind of careful attention to detail she later applied to her poetry. The herbarium is not just a reflection of Dickinson's love for the botanical world, it also contains many of the flowers that appear in her poems and letters. By exploring these plants, we can cultivate a deeper understanding of her work. Dickinson's collection also offers a glimpse into the local ecology of greater Amherst, where she spent nearly her entire life, with over 220 wildflowers revealing both familiar and surprising elements of the local flora.
In this talk, Peter Grima will dive into Dickinson's botanical interests and explain how she created her herbarium. Grima will show how these plants connect to her poetry and how they can add to the way we interpret her work. He’ll also explore the wildflowers and share what they tell us about the Amherst landscape that Dickinson would have known so well.
A preview of the at Lyman Plant House will follow the lecture. If you can't attend the lecture in person, a recording of it will be available on the .
About Peter Grima:
Peter Grima is a botanist and writer based in western Massachusetts. His botanical work focuses on floristic inventory of novel landscapes and the ecology and biogeography of rare species. He is coauthor of the 2020 Vascular Flora of Franklin County, Massachusetts, a recent update to the flora of the Mount Holyoke Range, and an upcoming flora of Mount Toby. He has also collected over 1,500 of his own herbarium specimens.
Peter has published scholarly work in The Emily Dickinson Journal and given several presentations at the annual meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society. He has also collaborated on the Dickinson Herbarium-inspired anthotype photography project This Earthen Door with visual artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, and he is coauthor of the forthcoming book Emily Dickinson's World of Flowers with international Dickinson scholar Baihua Wang of Fudan University, Shanghai.
All events are wheelchair accessible. For disability access information or accommodations requests, please call 413-585-2742 or send an email to at least 10 days before the event.