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... 

Hibiscus gallery

These lovely hisbiscus cultivars at Longwood Gardens are show-stoppers. Each bloom can easily reach the size of a dinner plate, and there are dozens on every individual shrub. It's a shame most are not hardy enough to overwinter in this region without the luxury of a greenhouse or a covered patio. 

Longwood Gardens Orchid Extravaganza

Another splendid estate of the du Ponts dotting the Brandywine Valley landscape that no garden-lover should miss is the ever-beautiful Longwood Gardens, the former country home of Pierre S. du Pont. This past weekend, I visited the Longwood Gardens during the Orchid Extravanganza, housed within the vast 4.5-acre conservatory that never seems to lack color, fragrance, and exciting arrays of blooms.

This time however, the highlight of the conservatory was the incredible display of beautiful specimens of Cattleya, Dendrobium, Phalaenopsis, Paphiopedilum, and Oncidium within the warm and cavernous interior. Even though the winds were howling at up to 50 mph outdoors, the conservatory felt more like a tropical rainforest - humid and balmy at around the 70s.

What an extravaganza indeed! Huge orchid arrangements in the form of trees, cascades of orchids next to small water features, and dozens of exotic orchid specimens in full bloom in the Orchid House. Entering one section of the conservatory to another, at every turn, were lush displays of orchids of all shapes, sizes, colors, and forms. My favorite has to be the lace-like petals of the Rhyncholaelia digbyana "Mrs Chase" hybrid (pictured below). And the title "extravaganza" also belies how it must have been an extravagant expense to groom these orchids and keep them warm and humidified during the all those snowstorms and whatnot over the winter.

Rhyncholaelia digbyana "Mrs Chase"

I've seen many hybrids of orchids before in tropical gardens (notably Singapore's unmatched National Orchid Garden), but here at Longwood, the display is evidence yet of the tremendous diversity of the Orchidacaea family. If the tulip mania was emblematic of civilization's craze for beauty in the 17th-century, the crown must now belong to orchids in the 21st-century for capturing our loving attention and our tireless willingness to cater to their every need!