Mums festival at Longwood Gardens

After a flurry of travel and other commitments, I'm finally able to get back to blogging about gardens and gardening again. We visited the annual Mums Festival at the Longwood Gardens about three weeks ago and I have to say I was really impressed by the fantastic display although I've not been a big fan of chrysanthemums previously.

The festival upped the ante for horticulture and landscaping in the recently expanded conservatory to a totally new level. The garden's horticulturists and volunteers have been painstakingly grafting hundreds of individual blooms of chrysanthemums onto single plants to create monumental arrangements for display since the previous summer. Unbelievable but true, each of these arrangements in the two pictures above have a single rooted plant supplying the nutrients to the fist-sized blooms covering the mushroom-shaped frame. One of the garden guides showed us the step-by-step process of an example of the grafting process, thanks to experts from Japan, which must have required an army of volunteers to graft, deadhead, and nurture these displays day and night over 18 months to get them to such a state of perfection.   

Apart from the remarkable displays of human control and ingenuity over these floral displays, the conservatory also featured a dizzying variety of heirloom species of chrysanthemums with all the shades of the color wheel one can think of and in different shapes and forms. These exhibits truly demonstrate the wonderful diversity in the chrysanthemum family beyond the typical garden center varieties of white, yellow and purple mums. 
 

My favorite was the purple peony-style chrysanthemums in one of the photographs below. Each bloom was as big as a toddler's head and some needed additional support to prevent them from flopping over with the weight of the bloom. Other varieties featured spaghetti-like or lacy and stringy petals it's hard to imagine these are all part of the same family of flowers.

This was certainly an enjoyable and educational visit and as usual, Longwood has put on a spectacular and crowd-pleasing exhibit. After visiting this year's Mums Fest, I'll have to find out where I can get my hands on one of these heirloom varieties for next year's growing season...