What would Emily want?
Move to replace hemlocks with hedge sparks debate
AMHERST - Exactly what inspired Emily Dickinson as she peered out the window of the bedroom where she wrote has bedeviled researchers and fans for more than a century.
It is so much a mystery that a plan by the Emily Dickinson Museum and Homestead to cut down nearly 200 hemlock trees outside her window and replace them with a hedge has sparked debate and a question in the town she seldom left: What would Emily want?
"Dickinson is the one American writer who is so keenly identified with one place, and it is that place," said Martha Ackmann, an English professor at Mount Holyoke College and vice president of the Emily Dickinson International Society. "My students want to know what she saw. I want to see what she saw."
And so might the thousands of visitors the museum draws each year - 11,000 in fiscal 2008.
Officials at the Dickinson museum and Amherst College, which owns the homestead, have determined what the poet would have seen from her window: a low-lying hemlock hedge. She also saw a hayfield and the Hol yoke mountain range from her window perch, but that view has been obliterated by a large apartment complex built across the street from her house.
As for the hedge, after Dickinson's death in 1886, it was no longer pruned regularly and grew out of control. Today, the hemlock shrubs are swaying, 25-foot-tall trees.
Jane Wald, executive director of the museum, said plans call for cutting down nearly all the hemlocks along the front of the homestead and replacing them with a "historically accurate" hedge. She offered up multiple photos of the Dickinson homestead as the poet would have known it, all with a hedge.
"Our goal as a historical site is to bring back the essence of this home during the period of its significance," she said. "This landscape was so important to the Dickinson family. Nature was so important to the Dickinson family."
Dickinson, renowned as a lovelorn spinster, wrote 1,800 poems, many about nature, God, life, and death, mostly from her bedroom. Her work, considered among the most important American poetry, frequently refers to trees, not hedges, and hemlocks in particular. But like much of her work, this leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
I think the Hemlock likes
to stand
Upon a Marge of Snow;
It suits its own Austerity,
And satisfies an awe.*
William Hutchinson, a member of the Amherst Shade Tree Committee for 48 years, called it "a shame" to cut down the hemlocks. The committee, which oversees the removal of any tree on public land in the town, has been undertaking an effort to plant 250 trees for Amherst's 250th birthday.
"To cut down a living tree . . . is a terrible waste of a good plant," Hutchinson said. "It changes the environment so much."
The town's tree warden, Alan Snow, said he would also be sorry to see the hemlocks go.
"A hemlock is an amazing tree," he said. Seedlings can thrive in the dark of the forest, yet quickly rocket skyward at the first sign of light.
"There are people who don't want them down because it changes Main Street. And there are people who don't want them down because they think Emily Dickinson wouldn't want these trees cut down," he said. "But we don't know what she wanted, do we?"
That depends on whom you talk to. Michele Aldrich, a retired Cornell University researcher and archivist who has given talks on Dickinson, called the poet an amateur geologist. And she said Dickinson would have preferred a hedge to a "rather forbidding" row of trees.
"There was an outgoing aspect to Emily Dickinson, too," Aldrich said. "I think she would have felt depressed by the line of trees" outside her window.
Ackmann also said Dickinson loved the view from her window, which looked out over Main Street. In a letter written in 1865 from Cambridge, where she was having dental work done, Dickinson told her sister, Lavinia, she was happy to learn that the hemlock hedge had been planted.
"I think that proves her feelings," Ackmann said. "I think she would say she loved that perspective and would want us to bring it back as clearly as we can."
The Trees like Tassels - hit
- and swung
There seemed to rise a Tune
From Miniature Creatures
Accompanying the Sun**
Wald said the new hedge will run 900 feet along Main Street, reconnecting the Dickinson homestead to the home her brother, Austin, occupied next door. Amherst College bought Austin Dickinson's house and land in 2004.
Austin Dickinson named his estate the Evergreens. But Wald discouraged people from reading too much into that. Austin owned a large swath of land and collected rare trees given to him by his friend, Frederick Law Olmstead, the famed landscape architect who designed the Boston-area chain of public parks known as the Emerald Necklace.
"This is restoration of a hedge, and there's more to the landscape than the hedge," she said.
Ann King, who owns a bed and breakfast that looks out onto the room where Emily Dickinson wrote her poems, said she likes the idea of a hedge. Many of the hemlocks that line the Dickinson property are infested or diseased, and several fall every winter.
King said she had no idea what Emily Dickinson would have wanted, but she sees no poetry in their boughs.
"I don't think they're very pretty," she said. "I don't like them at all."
The Hemlock's nature thrives on cold;
The Gnash of Northern winds
Is sweetest nutriment to him,
His best Norwegian Wines.*
* "I think the Hemlock likes to stand"
** "The Trees like Tassels - hit - and swung"
Emily Dickinson
Megan Woolhouse can be reached at mwoolhouse@globe.com. 