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My garden this year was not necessarily the magical success which I had hoped for it to be…but that’s ok, I can just write about someone else’s garden. My go-to garden for this kind of lazy blogging is Longwood Garden, a magical gilded age paradise in Chester County Pennsylvania which was the summer seat of the DuPont family.
Autumn is not the traditional apex of the gardening season, however Longwood Garden is such a stupendous garden that its planners can insouciantly eschew such conventional thinking. Every season is the apex of the gardening season there…up to and including winter (which is no petty feat in our temperate clime). To celebrate late autumn, Longwood created a Chrysanthemum festival with thousands of chrysanthemums agonizingly shaped into geometric forms by otherworldly patience (and by weird sadistic potting contraptions).
The effect is stupendous—it’s like what would happen if the world were invaded and colonized by beautiful alien flowers with a disturbing penchant for symmetry (although I guess that sort of did happen at the end of the Cretaceous). I hope someday I manage to actually get to Longwood to see the Chrysanthemum Festival in person. These pictures never do justice to the ineffable power of their pleasure gardens. The show runs until November the 19th so maybe my East Coast readers want to visit too.
Longwood Gardens Outdoor light display (by Daniel Traub)
I’m busy sprucing up the ol’ homestead for my holiday party and putting the finishing touches on my winter solstice decorations. As I was hanging festive lanterns in the denuded winter garden—which is empty of greenery save for the holly, the yew, and the hellebores—my minded drifted off to my favorite formal garden. Back when I was a sullen adolescent, my family would frequently visit the princely Longwood Gardens, a summer estate of the inhumanly rich Dupont family, monopolists who controlled a world-spanning empire of industrial chemicals. Although the Duponts are probably busy to this day despoiling things and making cheap indispensable products, they have long since turned over their formal gardens to a trust which runs them for the public benefit. Longwood Gardens are, weirdly, located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, “the Mushroom Capital of the World!” You can visit them any time (during business hours) if you have the fortitude to head to Pennsylvania.
Longwood Gardens Christmas
Anyway, looking at the wintry ruins of my own garden, I wondered whether Longwood Gardens escapes the ravages of the season, and, if so, how? Well, as you have probably guessed from the pictures, the professionals at Longwood have an exquisite winter garden! They landscape outside with conifers, topiaries, and lights. Inside their acres of climate controlled greenhouses, they are free to run wild and create whatever horticultural extravagances they can devise. So, as a holiday treat, check out these exquisite garden photos! Um, in my own garden, I put up some sparkly ornaments…and the holly really does look pretty. I guess we’ll get back to all of the other plants in spring…
I mean, yeah, that’s great and all…if exquisite views of an otherworldly paradise is your thing, but can they make chocolate pie with whipped topping? Happy winter solstice!
ferrebeekeeper 