40 Fun Facts About Longwood Gardens

Which kind of room at Longwood Gardens, set behind a Green Wall, was voted America's best in 2014?

The Restroom behind Longwood's fern-covered Green Wall won the America's Best Restroom contest in 2014. With 47,000 plants, it was the largest green wall in North America when it opened.

Longwood Gardens grows the titan arum, famous for a rare bloom that smells like what?

Rotting flesh is the scent the titan arum uses to lure its pollinators, which is why it is also called the corpse flower. Each bloom lasts only a day or so.

What did Pierre du Pont install in the basement of his Longwood house to delight his nieces and nephews?

A bowling alley went into the basement, lit from above by a glass-bottomed fish pond at ground level that doubled as a skylight.

Longwood Gardens lies just outside which Pennsylvania borough, nicknamed the Mushroom Capital of the World?

Kennett Square earned the nickname because farms in its region grow about half of America's mushroom crop. The borough celebrates with a Mushroom Festival every year.

Along with water, what can the rebuilt Main Fountain Garden at Longwood Gardens shoot from its wellheads?

Flames fed by propane lines rise from the same wellheads as the water. The trick was added when the 1931 fountains were rebuilt and reopened in 2017.

Which mythical creatures drool water into fountains in Longwood's Indoor Children's Garden?

Dragons drool and fish spit in the garden's child-sized fountains. The play space also hides a dripping cave and secret stairways.

The Lookout Loft and the Birdhouse are two of the three what that opened at Longwood Gardens in 2008?

Treehouses called Lookout Loft, Birdhouse and Canopy Cathedral went up in 2008. The Birdhouse is the tallest, perched on steel beams about 20 feet in the air.

Which instrument at Longwood Gardens filled fourteen freight cars and was the largest ever put in a home?

A pipe organ with 10,010 pipes was ordered by Pierre du Pont in 1929 for his ballroom. It needs a 72-horsepower blower to supply its wind.

The giant water-platters grown at Longwood Gardens belong to a genus named after which British monarch?

Queen Victoria gave her name to the genus of South American water-platters. Their floating leaves can reach six feet across in Longwood's pools.

Longwood Gardens creator Pierre du Pont sat on the founding board of which skyscraper opened in 1931?

The Empire State Building counted du Pont among its founding directors. By then he had already run both the DuPont company and a major car maker.

Longwood Gardens founder Pierre du Pont became president of which American car maker in 1920?

General Motors made du Pont its president in 1920, five years after he joined its board. He stepped down in 1923, handing over to Alfred Sloan.

The du Pont family, whose heir Pierre created Longwood Gardens, built its fortune on mills making what?

Gunpowder made the family rich after Éleuthère Irénée du Pont set up a mill near Wilmington in 1802. The site offered water power and willow wood for charcoal.

Whose commissioners sold farmer George Peirce 402 acres in 1700, land that became Longwood Gardens?

William Penn's commissioners sold Peirce the land, and his son Joshua built a brick farmhouse there in 1730. Enlarged several times, it still stands at the heart of the garden.

Which Native American people fished, hunted and farmed the land of Longwood Gardens for thousands of years?

The Lenape left quartz spear points on and around the property. Some are displayed in the old farmhouse at the centre of the garden.

George Peirce, who bought the future Longwood Gardens land in 1700, belonged to which religious group?

Quakers like Peirce left a second mark next door, where dissidents from the faith founded a meeting house in 1854. Pierre du Pont acquired the building after it closed in 1940.

What relation were Samuel and Joshua Peirce, who began planting the arboretum at Longwood Gardens in 1798?

Twin brothers Samuel and Joshua Peirce filled 15 acres with specimens gathered along the Eastern seaboard and from overseas. By 1850 it was among the finest collections in the nation.

What was Pierre du Pont's main reason for buying the Peirce farm that became Longwood Gardens in 1906?

To save its trees, du Pont stepped in after a lumber mill operator was contracted to clear the historic arboretum. He was 36 and had no plan to build a display garden.

Isabel Darlington, who handled Pierre du Pont's 1906 purchase of Longwood, was her county's first female what?

Lawyer Isabel Darlington, the first woman in the profession in Chester County, managed the July 1906 deal that put the farm in du Pont's hands.

Before the Civil War, the Long Woods around today's Longwood Gardens served as a station on what?

The Underground Railroad ran through the Long Woods, where people fleeing slavery in the South found shelter. Residents of nearby Hamorton and Wilmington supported the station.

Which French royal palace's fountains impressed Pierre du Pont before he built Longwood's Main Fountain Garden?

Versailles left its mark on the five-acre garden, which switched on in 1931 mixing French grandeur with Italian ornament and World's Fair showmanship.

Which city's 1893 World's Fair fountains inspired Pierre du Pont's Main Fountain Garden at Longwood Gardens?

Chicago's Columbian Exposition captivated a 23-year-old du Pont with its feats of hydraulics. Longwood traces its own fountains to the great one in the fair's Court of Honor.

The Villa Gori, which inspired the Open Air Theatre at Longwood Gardens, stands in which Italian city?

Siena's Villa Gori has an outdoor stage that Pierre du Pont saw in 1913. A year later he showed off his own theatre to 300 garden-party guests.

The Italian Water Garden at Longwood Gardens was modelled on the Villa Gamberaia, which lies near which city?

Florence's Villa Gamberaia so impressed du Pont that he copied a trick of perspective: his far pools are 14 feet longer than the near ones, so all four look equal from the overlook.

Longwood's Cascade Garden was designed by Roberto Burle Marx, a landscape architect from which country?

Brazil's Burle Marx, who also laid out the mosaic sidewalks of Copacabana, modelled the garden on an equatorial coastal rainforest.

The West Conservatory that opened at Longwood Gardens in 2024 holds a garden inspired by which region?

The Mediterranean inspired its three planted islands, which sit in a pool so that the whole glasshouse appears to float on water.

Which country cast the 62 bells of the carillon installed in the Chimes Tower at Longwood Gardens in 2001?

The Netherlands supplied the Eijsbouts carillon. The tower's original 25 tubular chimes could be switched on by Pierre du Pont from inside his house.

What often covers the sunken marble floor of the Exhibition Hall in the Longwood Gardens Conservatory?

A few inches of water turn the floor into a mirror for the seasonal displays. It is drained when the hall hosts performances, as it once did for the du Ponts' dances.

Which flowering vine on the Exhibition Hall pillars at Longwood Gardens is the original planting from the 1920s?

Bougainvillea trained up the hall's pillars and walls has grown there for about a century. It thrives in the humid air alongside Australian tree ferns.

The Ballroom ceiling at Longwood Gardens is made of 1,104 panes of etched glass tinted which colour?

Rose-coloured glass glows above a parquet floor and fabric-panelled walls. The room was built in 1929 for concerts, lectures and dinners.

Which seasonal Longwood Gardens display, begun in 2000, features miniature copies of the site's own landmarks?

A garden railway of G-scale model trains runs on nearly 500 feet of track each autumn and Christmas. Staff rebuild it from the ground up every year.

What is the maze made of in Longwood's Indoor Children's Garden, which also hides a dripping cave?

Bamboo forms the maze in the 4,000-square-foot play space, where hidden bugs wait to be spotted among colourful mosaic tiles.

Encephalartos woodii, a cycad kept at Longwood Gardens, survives only as clones of one male, giving it which status?

Extinct in the wild since the only known plant was removed, the cycad lives on as about 500 clones in collections. No female has ever been found.

Pierre and Alice du Pont were charter members of an American society for which flowers, a Longwood speciality?

Orchids were the couple's passion, bought from growers as far away as India and Thailand. Staff now pick fresh plants for the display five times a week.

Which evergreen is clipped into bunnies, spirals and cones in the Topiary Garden at Longwood Gardens?

Yew is the plant behind the garden's 35-plus topiaries. Thirty of them arrived in 1958 from an estate on Long Island.

Which flower do Longwood Gardens growers train so that a single plant carries more than a thousand blooms?

Chrysanthemum growers at Longwood once raised an 1,100-bloom plant 12½ feet wide. It took 1,800 hours of labour and barely fit through the Conservatory doors.

Which living art form at Longwood Gardens began in 1959 with thirteen trees bought from Yuji Yoshimura?

Bonsai arrived after Yoshimura's 1959 visit, when his classes filled at once and thirty would-be students were turned away. Four of his original thirteen trees survive.

Which mountain range is home to the blue poppies that Longwood Gardens forces into bloom indoors every March?

The Himalayas give the poppies a taste for cold, so Longwood keeps part of its Conservatory cool to coax the sky-blue, four-inch flowers open.

Longwood's grand Conservatory of 1921 grew out of Pierre du Pont's wish to raise which fruit out of season?

Citrus trees bought in Santa Barbara in 1920, from tangerines to navel oranges, were planted in a grid between the columns of the new glasshouse.

Longwood Gardens lies in the valley of which creek, also the site of a 1777 Revolutionary War battle?

Brandywine Creek saw George Washington's army beaten by the British near Chadds Ford on September 11, 1777. More troops fought there than in any other battle of the Revolution.

Granogue, a 505-acre du Pont estate acquired by Longwood Gardens, lies in which neighbouring state?

Delaware's Granogue, near Wilmington, was one of the last unprotected stretches of open space along its river corridor.