This Earthen Door

By Janelle Lynch

Published by LensCulture
September 2024

Book by Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey

Published by Datz Press, 2024

Used by botanists, ecologists, and researchers, a herbarium is a collection of preserved plants that are dried, pressed, and mounted on sheets of paper and labeled. Between 1839 and 1846, Emily Dickinson created her own when she was a student at Amherst Academy. During that time, on June 29, 1846, she wrote a letter to her friend and cousin, Elizabeth Holland, asking if she had made her own herbarium yet. “I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you.” Nearly two centuries later, her work has resurfaced in a new form; This Earthen Door, a book by artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey.

With her letters and poems, Dickinson’s herbarium is housed in the Emily Dickinson Room at Harvard University’s Houghton Rare Library. Due to its fragility, it cannot be accessed. Only a digitized facsimile is available to the public. But now, with This Earthen Door, the photography, botany, and literary communities have a new treasure comprising sublime anthotypes created from the herbarium, accompanied by Dickinson’s poems and texts in English and Korean by Marchand and Sobsey as well as the scholar Marta Werner. 

An ephemeral cameraless photograph, the anthotype was invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel, a British scientist and astronomer, during the same period that Dickinson created her herbarium. It is made using plant extracts, such as those from fruit, flowers, or leaves, which are light-sensitive due to inherent pigments and compounds. The extracts are coated onto paper. Once dry, an object or photographic negative or positive transparency is placed on the surface and then exposed to sunlight, often for extended periods of time depending on the season and geography. The areas exposed to light lose color, while the covered areas remain stable, thus creating an image. Over time, anthotypes fade due to their impermanent nature.

Each anthotype in This Earthen Door was made with one of 66 plants found in Dickinson’s original 66-page herbarium housing 424 species. In their own gardens in Canada and the United States, Marchand and Sobsey grew the same plants found in Dickinson’s herbarium. From these plants, they used extracts to create washes or they rubbed the fruits, petals, and leaves directly onto the paper’s surface. Once dry, they placed a digital negative or positive transparency of the original herbarium onto the paper and exposed it to light. Sometimes for a day, sometimes for weeks. 

An Anthotype Timing Chart is included in the accompanying booklet that provides an insight into the artists’ meticulous process. For each work, the chart notes the name of the plant that was grown to create the coating, the location, whether a digital negative or positive transparency was used, the timeline of the date and time of the exposure, and the season. Sobsey exposed Damask Rose, Plate 22, for example, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with a negative transparency between July 30th at 1:00pm and August 10th at 7:00pm. Marchand exposed Orange Jewelweed, Plate 65, in Lake Manitou, Quebec, with a negative transparency between September 24th at 4:30pm and October 20th at 1:00pm. The results—all 66 of them—are stunning. As is the entire book.

Much like the anthotypes themselves, This Earthen Door has a handcrafted quality. Elegantly designed by Seoul-based photographer and designer Younghea Kim, its purple hardcover is made from a wash of petunia flowers. The artists chose the color because it is the one Dickinson refers to most often in her poems and letters. The title in gold is a reference to her own garden and the original herbarium cover. It is borrowed from We can but follow to the Sun, one of Dickinson’s  poems included in the book. 

The cover opens to Swiss binding on the right and the aforementioned booklet inserted on the left, on the front of which is Bloom - is result -, a color wheel the artists made with plant coated papers. In the back of the booklet is a page to begin one’s own herbarium. And, like a gift that keeps giving, tucked into the inside of the back cover is a small piece of paper handmade by artist Ann Marie Kennedy with pressed wildflower seeds, including coreopsis, verbena, and New England aster, all found in Dickinson's herbarium and This Earthen Door. On it, printed in small type, is the poem To make a prairie. 

But, it is what is in between the book’s purple covers that is most astonishing. The anthotypes assert the wonder of nature and the presence of the divine. They embody the spirit, intelligence, and artistry of the three women who collaborated across space and time to make them. 

The book is not only a visual delight, but a tactile one as well. It begins and ends with seven distinctly textured endpapers, each the color of a coated anthotype, a pleasing contrast from the heavy smooth paper used throughout the book. Following the title page is Between My Country — and the Others, a poem from 1862, which reflects Dickinson’s characteristic exploration of the boundaries between the self and the external world, suggesting the delicate balance between isolation and connection. Timely and timeless notions. 

Marchand and Sobsey may have chosen this particular poem because as artists, they know about navigating between those worlds, and also because This Earthen Door was born during the COVID-19 pandemic while they were sheltering at home with their families. During those years, they engaged through distance in a remarkable collaboration, supported by the scholarship of scientists Dr. Kyra Krakos in Missouri and Peter Grima in Massachusetts. The result is a magnificent publication that is informed by research, chance, curiosity, and love. Like Dickinson’s poems, it will endure time.