West 8 urban design & landscape architecture has had the privilege of serving as master planners and landscape architects at Longwood Gardens since 2009. During this time, our team has gotten to know the culture, staff, traditions and seasons at Longwood, and walked every corner of the 1,077-acre site. For the Master Plan and the Main Fountain Garden we have worked with Longwood to take a big step back from the complex details of the horticulture and day-to-day operations. Along with our client team at Longwood, we have a huge ambition—to further root the Gardens within the canon of the greatest gardens of the world.

In July 1906, Pierre S. du Pont purchased the rights to the historic Peirce’s Park and surrounding lands, thereby establishing Longwood Gardens. One hundred and eleven years after Mr. du Pont’s purchase, we commemorate this historic act with our Founder’s Day weekend of festivities.

Longwood is home to the most significant fountain collection in North America and in June we celebrate all the fountains in our Gardens. From Pierre S. du Pont’s first single-jet fountain on the Flower Garden Walk to the 1,719-jet Main Fountain Garden, guests can learn more about Longwood’s fountains with tours and two new exhibits...

With soft, pastel-colored flowers, Clivia miniata ‘Longwood Sunset’ is a color breakthrough for our 40-year-old clivia breeding program. Apricot and peach tones imbue the reflexed, overlapping tepals with hues of a blushing sunset. Before being named and released, ‘Longwood Sunset’ received multiple awards at the North American Clivia Show in 2014. This year ‘Longwood Sunset’ will be exclusively available for purchase through a partnership with White Flower Farm.

Orchids are one of Longwood Gardens’ oldest and largest plant collections, with more than 2,200 different hybrids and species. On any given day, several hundred blooms are on display in the Orchid House in the Conservatory. For the past two years, this extensive and historic collection has been managed by Greg Griffis, Longwood’s orchid grower. As Greg acknowledges, a lot of work is required to keep all these orchids healthy and flourishing, and he relies on the help of a team of dedicated volunteers. I’m privileged to be one of them!

Orchids are an incredibly unique and fascinating group of plants. Many people can identify a Phalaenopsis (moth orchid) or Cattleya (the old corsage orchids), but the question often is asked, “What makes an orchid an orchid?” Orchids have some morphological (physical) traits that make them stand out from other plant families. In orchids, many of their floral parts come in groups of three.

Every year during A Longwood Christmas, we feature a small, tucked-away display of poinsettia cultivars in our North Passage (adjacent to our Bonsai display). These varieties are part of our efforts to continually improve the quality of our horticulture displays and introduce new plants to our guests. Midway through the Christmas season, a panel of gardeners, growers, researchers, and our display designer meet up to evaluate the poinsettias and decide which plants we want to grow in the future. Here are some of the panel’s thoughts from this year.

For a second season, staff members from all corners of the Gardens used their creative talents to design garden plots in our Trial Garden—all while engaging in a friendly competition. The process is a way for us to showcase new plants for our guests, evaluate each plant’s suitability for our display, and spotlight our staff’s design talents. Participants selected three to eight plants from a list of more than 160 plant species and cultivars. This year we had a total of 15 different combinations, including the top three combinations from last year's Trial Garden. The results are in!

The pinnacle of Pierre S. du Pont’s love for gardening is set to reopen next summer to the delight of thousands of eager guests. Meticulous planning went into the revitalization of the Main Fountain Garden, with much consideration given to preserving the legacy of Mr. du Pont and the property he purchased in 1906. In addition to saving the arboretum that the Peirce brothers started in 1798, Pierre became the steward of a large collection of boxwood that was planted among the trees leading to the Peirce home.

“Great soil is the foundation for a great landscape,” explains Claire Agre. A landscape architect, Agre is also a principal at West 8 urban design and landscape architecture, a design firm responsible for the execution of parks, gardens, waterfronts, and public spaces around the world. West 8’s latest project is to lead the landscape design of the Main Fountain Garden, including the planting of more than 2,600 boxwood in an exuberant hedge, 168 linden trees in Allee formation, and the development of additional pathways, furnishings, and fixtures for guests to enjoy. Great care was taken in all aspects of planning the Garden, from plant selection to bench design, but perhaps the most intensive aspect of the project was designing the soil upon which the Garden would thrive. But how does one design soil?

Our plant family is welcoming a new addition this summer: Canna ‘Longwood Simply Salmon’! This canna was bred here at Longwood and is being released commercially under the Longwood Gardens name. Canna is a genus of large tropical and sub-tropical rhizomatous perennial plants with showy flowers and foliage. Canna ‘Longwood Simply Salmon’ is a compact, virus-free cultivar with showy, salmon-colored flowers. Cannas have a strong presence at Longwood, as a favorite feature in our summer display. They also have a long history within our Research division.

I love this time of year in Peirce’s Woods, even though it feels like a non-stop race to pull all the weeds before they go to seed. The beauty of the woods in bloom makes me forget all that. Suddenly all the flowers in Peirce’s Woods have opened all at once. Peirce’s Woods is an art form garden, composed with native plants. The central design theme is large horizontal sweeps of groundcovers balancing the strong vertical lines of the mature tree trunks. Most of our native woodland flowers take advantage of the brief period in early spring before the trees fully leaf out to grow, flower and set seed. The two main groundcovers currently stealing the show are sweeps of white foamflowers (Tiarella) and ‘Sherwood Purple’ creeping phlox (Phlox stolonifera).

Built in 1931 by Pierre S. du Pont, the Main Fountain Garden was inspired by Pierre’s passion for engineering and design, and his travels to European gardens. After years of deteriorating stonework, many fountain features were turned off—leading to limited access to the Garden since the early ‘90s. In order to save this treasure, we embarked on a major restoration project. This spring will mark the halfway point of the two-year revitalization. In this post, we will go below the surface of the Main Fountain Garden and explore some of the engineering behind the beauty.

We are pleased to announce the release of Clivia miniata ‘Longwood Chimes’. This is the fourth named clivia introduction from our breeding program, which was started by Dr. Robert Armstrong in 1976. The flowers of ‘Longwood Chimes’ are a complex blend of bronze and burnt oranges with dark red overtones and a green throat. The red flush of the flowers, framed by leaves of dark olive green, deepens to dark red as the flowers age. ‘Longwood Chimes’ catches the eye of the clivia connoisseur and the novice alike. ‘Longwood Chimes’ will be on display on the fern floor in Exhibition Hall at the North American Cliva Show at Longwood on March 12–13, 2016. Because it is a plant that is slow to multiply, a limited number exist. This year Longwood Gardens will be offering a single plant of Clivia miniata ‘Longwood Chimes’ for auction on eBay. Bids will be accepted March 11–21, 2016.

As February transitions into March, those of us in Southeastern Pennsylvania are looking everywhere for signs of spring. This year, the grounds of Longwood Gardens are providing a half million new reminders that spring is just around the corner. Last fall, our gardeners, students, and volunteers completed a massive effort to add 500,000 early spring bulbs to the landscape, and these bulbs are beginning to bloom now!

My first year as the Orchid Grower at Longwood Gardens has been quite an adventurous one. This is a large collection to take on, and with its age and tradition, a very serious collection at that. Because of my background in retail orchid growing and the wholesale production of orchids, I was able to identify ways in which I wanted to restructure the culture and methods we use to manage the collection rather quickly.We have very big plans for the collection and its future growth. We are pursuing unusual and uncommon plants of high quality with tremendous aesthetic impact.

When Pierre and Alice du Pont were married in October 1915, the Longwood estate already boasted beautiful outdoor flower gardens, the Open Air Theatre, and a brand new addition to the Peirce-du Pont House—a conservatory. Their passion for gardens was evident. Features that we associate with Longwood today, like dahlias, roses, topiaries, fountains, champion trees, and brilliant spring bulbs were already notable; however, there were no orchids.

This Christmas, our Fern Passage provides a natural twist on our fountain-inspired theme. To accentuate the subtle beauty of this ancient plant family, we have installed some very unique igneous stone fountains. Robert Wertz is the artist and owner of Igneous Rock Gallery in Mechanicsburg, PA, and the creator of this special display. Robert obtains his stone from a small lava deposit in the remote Beaver Canyon, located in the Okanagan Highlands of Washington State. The stone of Beaver Canyon is a vibrantly-colored columnar andesite that formed as a result of a volcanic eruption some 45 million years ago. It is unique in the world, and though Robert occasionally works with other types of rock, the Beaver Canyon columns are his preferred artistic medium.

It was the age of flappers and jazz … but at Longwood Gardens it was more about industrial-strength classicism and illuminated fountains, thanks to the vision of Pierre S. du Pont. Mr. du Pont was in the technology business of chemistry and automobiles. He was building skyscrapers, chemical factories, and assembly lines, so it wasn’t hard to adapt technology to make fountains spurt and glow. Longwood’s first fountain (1907), on the Flower Garden Walk, was supplied by gravity from a tank in the Peirce-du Pont House attic, which in turn was fed from a hydraulic ram at the Large Lake. No electricity was required since the power to push water uphill came from the water itself...

A life lesson here in Japan is that beauty is, without a doubt, in the eye of the beholder. Learning about the Japanese perception of beauty in contrast to our own has been a fascinating study in aesthetic. The chrysanthemum has provided us with the perfect subject matter to view these differences and has given us a whole new perspective on our own Chrysanthemum Festival at Longwood Gardens.