{"id":3868,"date":"2023-08-24T21:57:19","date_gmt":"2023-08-25T01:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/emily-dickinson-and-the-secret-of-earths-most-supernatural-flower-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-08-24T21:57:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T01:57:19","slug":"emily-dickinson-and-the-secret-of-earths-most-supernatural-flower-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/emily-dickinson-and-the-secret-of-earths-most-supernatural-flower-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Dickinson and the Secret of Earth\u2019s Most Supernatural Flower \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the late autumn of 1890, four years after Emily Dickinson\u2019s death, her poems met the world for the first time in a handsome volume bound in white. Beneath the gilded title was a flower painting by Mabel Loomis Todd<\/a> \u2014 the complicated woman chiefly responsible for editing and publishing Dickinson\u2019s poems and letters. <\/p>\n

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Any flower would have been a fitting emblem for the poet who spent her life believing that \u201cto be a Flower is profound Responsibility,\u201d<\/a> but none more than this one \u2014 a flower she had collected in the woods of Amherst as \u201ca wondering Child,\u201d then pressed into her teenage herbarium<\/a> and into her poems, enchanted by its \u201calmost supernatural\u201d appearance. <\/p>\n

She considered it \u201cthe preferred flower of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Monotropa uniflora<\/em>, known as ghost pipe, is unlike the vast majority of plants on Earth. White as bone, it lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons and turn light into sugar for life<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Throughout the summer \u2014 usually after rainfall, usually under beech trees \u2014 the ghost pipe emerges from the darkest regions of the forest floor in clusters, from the Himalayas to Costa Rica to Amherst. Each stem bears a single nodding flower \u2014 a tiny chandelier of several translucent petals encircling its dozen stamens and single pistil. Bumblebees, drawn to the pale beauty despite their astonishing ultraviolet vision<\/a>, are the ghost pipe\u2019s most passionate pollinators.<\/p>\n

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