At Pennsylvania's Longwood Gardens, Mum's the Word

Not all great gardens are located in Europe. One outstanding example can be found here, just a short, two-hour drive from Washington, DC. Covering 1,077 acres and boasting one of the world’s largest greenhouse structures, Longwood Gardens is a stunning garden paradise of majestic proportions and a mastery of scale guaranteed to impress.

The classical style gardens are part of a formal estate built in 1919 by the Pierre du Pont family.  Sitting atop a rise overlooking the property is the Longwood Conservatory, a palatial iron and stone structure with vaulted glass windows. Here, massive ivy-clad pillars encircle lush green lawns surrounded by seasonal beds in 4 ½ acres of covered displays.

On view in the Conservatory through November 23 is the Chrysanthemum Festival, which showcases the Asian tradition of cultivating chrysanthemums into artistic shapes. The display includes over 80,000 blooms that have been nurtured and trained into sculptural forms. 

A highlight of the show is the Thousand Bloom Mum, (a single potted plant) featuring more than 1,500 blooms all arranged in a dome – the largest of its kind grown outside of Asia. A pair of giant mum domes also flanks the entry to the Exhibition Hall.

Live blooms make up many other artistic forms throughout the exhibit. There are chrysanthemum shields of pink, giant hanging balls of blue, yellow spirals in clay pots and an impressive 10’ hanging “chandelier” of red and yellow.  Purple mums wrap the majestic stone columns while others cascade from the ceiling. Many other unusual cultivars can be found tucked into  seasonal beds of complementary colors.

Even at fall’s end, the outdoor gardens are resplendent in their bare simplicity, setting Longwood’s grand architecture to its best advantage.  There are over 325 acres and 20 gardens to explore.

The day we visited the staff was hard at work preparing the outdoors for the not-to-be-missed Christmas display for which Longwood is perhaps most famous. Still, there were soft yellow drifts of oak leaf hydrangeas and bottlebrush buckeyes coloring the landscape.  A walk through the woods revealed dusty blue asters peaking from the dried leaves while overhead brilliant Japanese maples and the incomparable yellow leaves of the Ginkgo tree were on full display.

To visit: go to http://longwoodgardens.org/events-and-performances/events/chrysanthemum-festival

Posted by Carole Funger
Photos: D. Gingergy

#Longwood Gardens #Chrysanthemum