Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
BIG IS BETTER, BIGGEST IS BEST!
America loves a show – and the bigger the better. The largest and most extraordinary example of this is at Longwood Gardens, just outside Philadelphia, which extends to more than a thousand acres. Yet its origins were relatively humble.
It was bought in 1906 as a farm by Pierre du Pont, a wealthy local chemicals manufacturer, to save a grove of ancient trees that were to be cut down. He enlarged the house and added a conservatory.
But this was just the beginning. Ten years later he built a new conservatory that was eventually to cover 4½ acres under glass filled with a dazzling – albeit rather garish – display of exotic plants swinging through it like a line of showgirls.
Outside, the excess gets even greater. The meadow stretches to 90 acres, the flanking herbaceous borders are 180 metres long, the open-air theatre can accommodate 1,500 people at a sitting to watch up to 100 performers, and the main fountain garden – there are three in all – has more than 1,700 computer-controlled fountains and five miles of piping. A million visitors a year pay £20 each to come to the garden, which accounts for its recent £70 million revamp.
A very different garden in Palm Springs, California, is also the result of extraordinary wealth and ambition. Walter Annenberg was a media mogul owning, among other publications, TV Guide, which launched in the 1950s and at its height was selling a billion copies a year. He and his wife Leonore loved both Palm Springs and golf, so they bought 900 acres of empty desert and built a large house surrounded by their own private golf course, set among dozens of acres of mown grass and 6,000 trees. The arid conditions didn’t bother him – Walter simply bought the local water company to make sure the grass was kept sprinkled and the 13 lakes filled. Statesmen, royalty, showbusiness stars and sporting legends all came, ensuring Sunnylands became the most glamorous place for the very famous and very rich to visit. Having sold their empire to Rupert Murdoch for £1.75 billion in 1988, the Annenbergs became among America’s greatest philanthropists, giving a huge amount of their money away. Today Sunnylands is open to the public and is also a location for diplomatic meetings at the highest level. The golf course is still there, and in their will the Annenbergs left a stipulation that any president of the United States had the right to play there whenever he or she liked. So far, Mr Trump is the first president not to have taken up the offer.