Emily Dickinson Museum Recreates Original Conservatory Where Poet Was Inspired

The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, this weekend is opening a reconstructed plant conservatory at the house where the poet often wrote about nature.

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Museum director Jane Wald said the staff used archeological digs, photographic evidence and other research to figure out how to build the glass structure; the original was razed after the poet died in the late 1800s.

Wald said Dickinson herself helped them decide which plants would populate the conservatory.

"[There were] many many references, of course, in her nearly 2,000 poems to flowers, colors, to a full sensory experience of blooms and nature and the natural world," Wald said, "that she brought into the small space of her own."

 Wald said they had to guess how she might have designed or organized the space, as there are no known pictures from the inside the house or conservatory.