The gardener’s bucket list
Longwood Gardens in the US
Oh to live in an era when the very rich loved gardens, and they spent personal time, energy and dollars on developing and nurturing them! Longwood Gardens, just outside of Philadelphia, emerged in such a time. It was the very expensive, very indulgent playground of Pierre S du Pont. And whatever you might think about such extravagance, the world of horticulture is now the beneficiary of his spending.
The garden is more than 436 hectares, and has an annual running budget of more than US$50 million, much of which comes from an endowment left by its creator.
But what goes on there is not just about titillating and wowing the visiting public, though it certainly does that. There’s serious research underway, and a great team of horticulturists practising gardening at its most demanding level.
The garden is appealingly idiosyncratic, as all personal gardens should be. There’s some truly (and wonderfully) crazy stuff going on, such as the immense, digitally controlled pipe organ, consisting of more than 10,000 pipes, in a ballroom attached to a 1.8ha group of glasshouses.
A single Italianate fountain covers more than 2ha of land, and responds to piped music that’s played several times a day. Perhaps most individual of all, there’s a fantastically nerdy timepiece, obsessed over by du Pont himself, in which a daily movable upright rod provides a perfect sundial every day of the year.
But it’s the plants and the planting that make a visit to Longwood so memorable. Springtime reveals sheets of tulips in fabulous and surprising combinations. Heights, colours and flowering times are meticulously studied and recorded to ensure that planned combinations flower at exactly the same time, and at perfect relative heights for maximum impact. Elsewhere, garden rooms are filled with annuals and biennials that are so perfectly grown and staked as to totally reset your expectations of personal horticultural achievement. Altogether less intense,
but no less lovely, are the large areas of woodland, in which the ground that surrounds local native dogwoods and redbud trees is carpeted with native phlox, trilliums and foamflower.
In sync with current thinking around conservation and sustainability, there are large areas of carefully managed wildflower meadow, while the public toilets are semi-underground and lined with green walls, which make a visit to the loo an absolute must!
Longwood is a mind-blowing spectacle and horticultural wonderland in equal measure, guaranteed to equally please the serious garden lover and their bored partner or teenage travelling companions, at any time of the year.