The Preferred Flower of Life

There is a plant in the deep shade of North American, Latin American and East Asian forests that carries no green at all. It cannot photosynthesise. It does not reach for the light. It draws everything it needs from fungal threads in the soil, which draw theirs from the roots of trees — so the plant lives, entirely, on a connection nobody above ground can see. Linnaeus named it in 1753 for the single turn of its stem. Emily Dickinson pressed it into a herbarium, wrote a poem about it, and called it the preferred flower of life. Two hundred and thirty-eight years after the naming, an Autistic researcher and her neighbour reached for the same Greek root to describe a mind whose attention runs in one deep channel instead of many shallow ones.

Seven hands on one specimen Link to this section

This sheet is a wall rather than a reading, and the difference is not decoration. A reading has an order and an argument that arrives at the end. A wall has a chorus: many people, across two hundred and seventy years, standing in front of the same object and each seeing something the others could not. A herbarium sheet that has been in a cabinet long enough looks exactly like this — a specimen, and a stack of determination slips in different hands, every one of them signed.

• That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life, seems almost supernatural, and the sweet glee that I felt at meeting it, I could confide to none.

• This limitless HyperboleEach one of us shall be -‘Tis Drama - if HypothesisIt be not Tragedy -

• He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.

• Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.

• I haven’t really ever had a career, I’ve had a mission.

• It is a plant that refuses to be binary at the root of its being, in the same way it refuses to draw its nourishment from sunlight, the way other plants are expected to.

• The quality of presence that the world persistently mistakes for absence, the inner life that runs deeper than it appears from the outside?

One root, three turns Link to this section

The Greek monotropos means turning one way. Linnaeus took it for the arched stem of a flower. Two centuries later two women in London took it for a mind. Nobody planned the rhyme, and it is not a metaphor either: it is the same word, describing the same shape twice.

1. monotropos

   Greek

   Turning one way; of a single turn. Monos, one, and tropos, a turn — the same tropos that gives English trope, a turn of phrase.

2. Monotropa

   1753

   Linnaeus’s genus, in Species Plantarum. The turn is physical: the stem arches over so the single flower hangs facing the ground. A plant named for the direction it bends.

3. monotropism

   1991 onward

   Attention pooled in one deep channel rather than spread thin across many. Coined by Dinah Murray with her neighbour Jeanette Buirski, and set out in Murray, Lesser and Lawson’s 2005 paper. A turn you are, not a turn you make.

The 2005 paper is Murray, Lesser and Lawson, Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism, in Autism 9(2), 139–156. Its third author is Wenn Lawson, and the journal’s byline still reads Wendy Lawson. He is a trans man who has published under Wenn for years, and a citation that reproduces a publisher’s record over a living author’s own name is not neutral accuracy — it is a database outranking a person. We cite him as Wenn Lawson and say what the byline says, so a reader can find the paper and nobody has to be deadnamed to do it.

Two hands, and one of them is the same hand Link to this section

Mabel Loomis Todd painted a panel of Indian pipes and sent it to Emily Dickinson in September 1882. Dickinson wrote back within days, in pencil, and told her she had sent the preferred flower of life. Eight years later, when Todd and T. W. Higginson brought out the first posthumous Poems, that painting went on the cover.

Todd is also one of the two editors who tidied Dickinson. Sheet No. 6 is about what they did to Wild nights: Higginson wrote let us alter as little as possible and then printed the poem with eight of its nine dashes gone. The hand that gave Dickinson her favourite flower is the hand that regularised her punctuation. That is not hypocrisy and it is not a scandal — it is what editing was, and Todd is the reason a great deal of Dickinson survived at all. It is simply worth saying that the same person can be the gift and the alteration, and that a reader who only has the tidied text cannot tell.

Gift and alteration, one hand.

A poem, and what 1896 did to it Link to this section

Three years before the letter, Dickinson had already written the plant down. The poem survives on a fragment of stationery, in pencil, about 1879.

She left herself alternatives, and the first editors took them. Franklin records three words Dickinson wrote in as options: denote for imply in line 5, designate for intimate in line 6, and What customs for What function in line 8. When the poem was first printed in Poems (1896) it appeared as three quatrains, with the alternatives for lines 5 and 8 adopted — so the version that circulated read denote and What customs, and the version above is the one on the paper.

Neither reading is a mistake. She wrote both. But an editor choosing between a poet’s alternatives, silently, and printing the result as the poem is the same move as removing her dashes, and it is the move this collection keeps finding. The alternatives are the poem too. A text that has had its options resolved for you is a text with a decision hidden in it.

‘Tis Drama — if Hypothesis It be not Tragedy

She kept a herbarium, which is what this site is Link to this section

Dickinson assembled more than four hundred pressed plants as a young woman, mounted and labelled, and the album is now in Harvard’s Houghton Library — the same library that holds the manuscript on Sheet No. 6. Monotropa uniflora is in it.

This site is drawn as a herbarium sheet because the form makes an attribution argument: a specimen is somebody else’s, a label is where we speak, and the line between them is drawn in the layout rather than left to a reader’s good faith. It is a slightly strange thing to discover that the poet on two of our sheets was doing the same thing at nineteen, with real plants, in an album, in Amherst.

Which is also the answer to the question people keep asking about her life. From outside it looked like a withdrawal. From the letters, the poems, and four hundred labelled specimens, it looks like the opposite: attention pooled, at length, on a small number of things, with enormous care. There is a word for that now, and the word shares a root with the flower.

Not a tragedy Link to this section

The plant is white because it has given up chlorophyll. It has no leaves. It grows in the dark, on the forest floor, out of leaf litter, and it feeds through fungi that feed through trees. By every measure a plant is usually judged by, it is failing at being a plant.

It is also perfectly well. It is not a parasite on trees and not a saprophyte on rot, which is what botanists thought for a century; it is a myco-heterotroph, and the arrangement works. The plant is not doing without a connection to light. It is connected to light through somebody else. That is not a lesser way to be alive, and Star Stuff has the numbers on how the carbon actually moves.

Dickinson’s last line does not say the thing is a tragedy. It says: ‘Tis Drama - if Hypothesis / It be not Tragedy - — which reads, turned around, as a hope with a condition on it. Helen puts the same thought without the subjunctive: the ghost pipe is not a tragedy, and neither are Autistic people, and both thrive when the conditions are right rather than when they are corrected.

Dinah Murray spent her last years photographing lichens and mushrooms on the Fife coast — the same kingdom of organisms this plant lives through, attended to closely, for their own sake, by someone who had given the world a word for exactly that kind of attention. Kate Fox called the memorial poem Monotropa Uniflora. It was the right name.

Provenance Mounted 9 September 2026. Label corrected once before it shipped — a quotation on the essay this sheet follows is credited to the wrong book, and it is credited here to the right one.