Longwood Gardens
Interesting facts
- The pipes of the Longwood organ filled fourteen railway freight cars, and a 72-horsepower blower is needed to supply its wind.
- Du Pont borrowed a single chime to test how far its sound carried before buying the largest set he could find, and later rang them by switch from his house.
- The 2010 indoor green wall of about 47,000 plants was the largest in North America when built, and the restrooms behind it were voted America's best in 2014.
- The Cascade Garden is the only garden in North America designed by the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.
- The sunken marble floor of the conservatory's Exhibition Hall is regularly flooded with a few inches of water to mirror the seasonal displays.
- The ballroom ceiling is made of 1,104 panes of rose-coloured etched glass.
- The arboretum that du Pont saved was begun in 1798 by the Peirce twins, Samuel and Joshua, and by 1850 was counted among the finest tree collections in the country.
- According to a 1940 state guide, the name comes from the Long Woods, where people escaping slavery sheltered on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War.
- The waterlily pools are dyed black so that their surfaces act as mirrors for the flowers and the sky.
Why it is worth it
Longwood Gardens is the grand estate garden of an American industrialist, scaled up into one of the most ambitious horticultural displays in the United States. Across more than 1,100 acres of the Brandywine Valley it combines woodland, meadow and formal gardens with a vast glasshouse complex and a series of fountain gardens in which water is choreographed with light and music. Some 1.6 million people came in 2023 alone.
The story begins with trees. In 1906 a timber dealer was preparing to fell the old arboretum planted on the farm of the Peirce family, and Pierre S. du Pont, head of the du Pont chemical company, bought the property to save it. The modest brick Peirce-du Pont House, begun by Joshua Peirce in 1730, is the oldest building on the estate and served du Pont as a country retreat. Over the following decades he turned the farm into a showplace drawn from what he had seen in Europe. The Open Air Theatre of 1914 has its own fountains; the Italian Water Garden, built in the mid-1920s, was inspired by the Villa Gamberaia near Florence; and the main conservatory, opened in 1921, now covers more than an acre and a half of indoor gardens. In 1929 du Pont installed an Aeolian organ with more than 10,000 pipes, described as the largest ever built for a private residence. The five-acre Main Fountain Garden, first switched on in 1931, was rebuilt between 2014 and 2017, and in November 2024 a new West Conservatory opened as part of a major expansion.
Du Pont opened the gardens to the public in 1921 and in 1937 placed them in the Longwood Foundation, which still runs them. The surrounding country of rolling farmland and old stone villages lies in southern Chester County, close to the Delaware state line and the du Pont family's home city of Wilmington.
Getting there
Longwood Gardens lies just outside Kennett Square in Chester County, Pennsylvania, on US Route 1. West Chester is about 11.5 km away. The nearest airport is Wilmington (ILG), about 22 km away; the nearest major airport is Philadelphia International (PHL), roughly 37 km to the east in a straight line.
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From the encyclopaedia
Longwood Gardens is a public garden that consists of more than 1,100 acres of gardens, woodlands, and meadows in the Brandywine Creek Valley in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, United States. It is one of the premier horticultural display gardens in the United States and is open to visitors year-round to enjoy native and exotic plants and horticulture, events and performances, seasonal and themed attractions, as well as educational lectures, courses, and workshops.
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