There’s a Christmas tree made out of moss, one made out of roses and another made out of CANDY! If there was a reason to visit Longwood Gardens, that last one should be at the top.
Conceived as a Gilded Age estate by industrial magnate Pierre Samuel du Pont, Longwood Gardens, roughly an hour outside of Philadelphia, emerged as the premier display garden of the United States, and one of the ways it keeps the momentum going is morphing the grounds in sync with both the season and the holiday. Spring heralds daffodils and tulips; summer is dominated by fireworks and the laser shows of “Nightscape.” Fall ushers in the world-famous Chrysanthemum Festival. But with Christmas comes a case study of everything you can do with a plant, an LED, and the 2019 incarnation, a lolly.
Lights and Sights
Having grown from a modest retreat to a whopping 1,077-acre behemoth, with gardens, fountains, and forests sprawled over southeastern Pennsylvania, the undisputed jewel of Longwood is actually not outside but in. Carved up into 20 individual interior gardens, the 4.5-acre conservatory is Eden in a roid-rage; tropical flowers, cacti, and bamboo all mesh in a crash-course of espaliering plants, cloning plants, splicing plants, pruning plants, bonsai-ing plants, and plants trained to grow upside-down … well, of course!
And at Christmas, it all positively glitters. Blending technical razzle with botanical dazzle, Longwood overwhelms and soothes. Every year is different; this year is a “confectioner’s Christmas”: while LG’s horticultural maestros cover the entire conservatory complex with Christmas trees of every shape and design, the Big Daddy has always been in the Music Room, and this year with a little help from the Shane Confectionery (the oldest candy maker in the US), a masterpiece of marshmallows and spun sugar awaits.
It’s Christmas when we all were kids, the only things more important than the Transformers and Barbie Dreamhouses were candy canes and chocolate balls. A huge fir in the corner, topped with lollipops initially enchants, but you’ll get the feelies even a little more with the Christmas tree-shaped stack of shelves bursting with a rainbow of candies and sweets only a six-year-old could run off.
Here We Come A-Wassailing
Mindful the conservatory can hold only so many people, Longwood wisely splashes the Christmas spirit all over the property. An inveterate traveler, du Pont incorporated into the grounds anything that caught his eye abroad: the main fountain garden descends directly from the waterworks of Versailles, and while the nozzles are shut off in winter, an LED display set to music makes one hardly notice. On the Forest Walk, where du Pont let nature take over, glowing orbs guide visitors along meandering walkways to twinkling trees that lead to the Pierce-du Pont House, where du Pont both obsessed over his estate and ran an international empire. The man multitasked.
Amazingly, he wasn’t initially sold on the place. Never one to consider land a sound investment, he wrote: “I have purchased a small farm. As I have always considered the purchase of real estate a sign of mental derangement and have so proclaimed, I fear that my friends may be looking for permission to inquire into my condition.”
But perhaps prophetically he added, “I believe the purchase worth the risk, for my farm is a very pretty little place.”
And how.
