Our Blog

Longwood has a remarkable number of places within the garden for you to escape the heat and put your life into chill-mode.

When you think of summer flowers, it’s important to consider the differences between summer plants that thrive in hot summer climates versus those that prefer mild summer temperatures.

Located adjacent to our Student Exhibition Garden, our new-this-season bog garden mimics naturally occurring bogs in the eastern United States, where carnivorous plants, orchids, blueberries, and plants that like having “wet feet” can grow naturally.

Now available in The Garden Shop are joyful bouquets sourced straight from Idea Garden horticulturists and designed into bouquets by the creative minds at The Garden Shop, just steps away.

When you think of autumn in a garden, pumpkins and squashes most likely come to mind—and for good reason! Follow along as we share more about these festive fall favorites, how to grow them at home, and how we’ll soon be featuring their flavor here at Longwood in what may be a very unexpected way.

Featuring five unique garden spaces—including the redesigned Ornamental Kitchen Garden—the Idea Garden echoes some of the classical elements of the Main Fountain Garden and blends the formal with the less formal, and notably the agrarian.

This year, as part of the Professional Horticulture Program, our nine students have been asked to design, create and maintain three garden designs based on the scheme of change and adaptation.

This year, as part of the Professional Horticulture Program, our nine students have been asked to design, create, and maintain three garden designs based on the theme of change and adaptation.

This summer, the Idea Garden is home to three special plots that showcase a guest favorite, as well as culturally significant crops that tell robust stories.

From fragrant dwarf cardamom to vibrant mandarinquats, a variety of tropical herbs and plants are thriving in our Idea Garden, all of which can be reliably grown and enjoyed by home gardeners in the mid-Atlantic region.

This week is National Pollinator Week, an annual event that celebrates pollinators, addresses the urgent issue of declining pollinator populations, and supports all we can do to protect them.

While sun gardens are places in which every flower color under the sun can be showcased, shade gardens are more subtle and elegant … and definitely a way to enjoy your outdoor space while taking refuge from the midsummer heat.

After not being able to have a Student Exhibition Garden in 2020 because of the onset of COVID-19, we are incredibly excited to once again proudly showcase our students’ beautiful visions, hard work, and utmost care in the form of the three distinct gardens that reflect this year’s Student Exhibition Garden theme—signature and identity.

If timed carefully, the vegetable gardener can reap the rewards of frost-tolerant spring vegetables—peas, broccoli, kale, arugula, cabbage, spinach, carrots, radishes, scallions, cilantro, and lettuce, to name a few.

This growing season, Longwood joined the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in their new program, Harvest 2020. An initiative designed to help address the 11 percent of households in the Greater Philadelphia region that are food insecure and unable to access healthy, fresh food on a daily basis.

We are so pleased to welcome a new addition to our Idea Garden—an intricately detailed, beautifully realistic life-sized bronze sculpture by celebrated Brandywine Valley artist André Harvey (1941–2018).

This month, don’t forget about fall crops, or you will miss out on a bounty of greens, root vegetables, squashes, and more—many of which are of higher quality in cool fall weather and can store through the winter.