Longwood Gardens
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40 free Longwood Gardens trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Longwood Gardens began as a family farm and grew into one of America's great display gardens, with more than 1,100 acres of flower beds, woods, meadows and glasshouses in the countryside west of Philadelphia. Pierre S. du Pont bought the land in 1906 and spent the next half-century filling it with fountains, music and plants from around the world. This quiz turns the garden's best fun facts into questions: who lived here before the du Ponts, where the ideas for the fountain shows came from, what grows under the glass, and which odd surprises are tucked into the house, the theatre and the children's garden. It suits anyone planning a visit, teachers and parents looking for kid-friendly facts, and locals who think they already know every path. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few stories to tell on your next walk around the grounds.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which kind of room at Longwood Gardens, set behind a Green Wall, was voted America's best in 2014?
Restroom
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.
Q 02Longwood Gardens grows the titan arum, famous for a rare bloom that smells like what?
Rotting flesh
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.
Q 03What did Pierre du Pont install in the basement of his Longwood house to delight his nieces and nephews?
A bowling alley
A bowling alley went into the basement, lit from above by a glass-bottomed fish pond at ground level that doubled as a skylight.
Q 04Longwood Gardens lies just outside which Pennsylvania borough, nicknamed the Mushroom Capital of the World?
Kennett Square
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.
Q 05Along with water, what can the rebuilt Main Fountain Garden at Longwood Gardens shoot from its wellheads?
Flames
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.
Q 06Which mythical creatures drool water into fountains in Longwood's Indoor Children's Garden?
Dragons
Dragons drool and fish spit in the garden's child-sized fountains. The play space also hides a dripping cave and secret stairways.
Q 07The Lookout Loft and the Birdhouse are two of the three what that opened at Longwood Gardens in 2008?
Treehouses
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.
Q 08Which instrument at Longwood Gardens filled fourteen freight cars and was the largest ever put in a home?
A pipe organ
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.
Q 09The giant water-platters grown at Longwood Gardens belong to a genus named after which British monarch?
Queen Victoria
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.
Q 10Longwood Gardens creator Pierre du Pont sat on the founding board of which skyscraper opened in 1931?
Empire State Building
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.
Q 11Longwood Gardens founder Pierre du Pont became president of which American car maker in 1920?
General Motors
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.
Q 12The du Pont family, whose heir Pierre created Longwood Gardens, built its fortune on mills making what?
Gunpowder
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.
Q 13Whose commissioners sold farmer George Peirce 402 acres in 1700, land that became Longwood Gardens?
William Penn
Q 21Which city's 1893 World's Fair fountains inspired Pierre du Pont's Main Fountain Garden at Longwood Gardens?
Chicago
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.
Q 22The Villa Gori, which inspired the Open Air Theatre at Longwood Gardens, stands in which Italian city?
Siena
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.
Q 23The Italian Water Garden at Longwood Gardens was modelled on the Villa Gamberaia, which lies near which city?
Florence
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.
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.
Q 14Which Native American people fished, hunted and farmed the land of Longwood Gardens for thousands of years?
Lenape
The Lenape left quartz spear points on and around the property. Some are displayed in the old farmhouse at the centre of the garden.
Q 15George Peirce, who bought the future Longwood Gardens land in 1700, belonged to which religious group?
Quakers
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.
Q 16What relation were Samuel and Joshua Peirce, who began planting the arboretum at Longwood Gardens in 1798?
Twin brothers
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.
Q 17What was Pierre du Pont's main reason for buying the Peirce farm that became Longwood Gardens in 1906?
To save its trees
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.
Q 18Isabel Darlington, who handled Pierre du Pont's 1906 purchase of Longwood, was her county's first female what?
Lawyer
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.
Q 19Before the Civil War, the Long Woods around today's Longwood Gardens served as a station on what?
The Underground Railroad
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.
Q 20Which French royal palace's fountains impressed Pierre du Pont before he built Longwood's Main Fountain Garden?
Versailles
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.
Q 24Longwood's Cascade Garden was designed by Roberto Burle Marx, a landscape architect from which country?
Brazil
Brazil's Burle Marx, who also laid out the mosaic sidewalks of Copacabana, modelled the garden on an equatorial coastal rainforest.
Q 25The West Conservatory that opened at Longwood Gardens in 2024 holds a garden inspired by which region?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean inspired its three planted islands, which sit in a pool so that the whole glasshouse appears to float on water.
Q 26Which country cast the 62 bells of the carillon installed in the Chimes Tower at Longwood Gardens in 2001?
Netherlands
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.
Q 27What often covers the sunken marble floor of the Exhibition Hall in the Longwood Gardens Conservatory?
A few inches of water
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.
Q 28Which flowering vine on the Exhibition Hall pillars at Longwood Gardens is the original planting from the 1920s?
Bougainvillea
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.
Q 29The Ballroom ceiling at Longwood Gardens is made of 1,104 panes of etched glass tinted which colour?
Rose
Rose-coloured glass glows above a parquet floor and fabric-panelled walls. The room was built in 1929 for concerts, lectures and dinners.
Q 30Which seasonal Longwood Gardens display, begun in 2000, features miniature copies of the site's own landmarks?
A garden railway
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.