Longwood Backstage

August 23rd, 2011

Plants seem to grow beautifully, effortlessly and trouble-free all throughout Longwood Gardens’ 1,077 acres in Chester County.

This is NOT easy, even for Longwood Gardens staff.

Don’t be fooled.

Plenty of behind-the-scenes, basic, down-and-dirty manpower goes into the jaw-dropping show we all see.

Longwood staff gave a sneak peak at some of it during my latest trip in this year’s Lowee’s Group Tours garden series.

The most fascinating part to me was how Longwood grows and readies the more than 11,000 different types of plants it displays.

About 65 percent of the plants you see in the gardens are grown on site. That amounts to a staggering 80,000 pots per year.

Unlike a grower for the retail market, Longwood grows relatively small quantities of a whole lot of species.

Many of these are unusual species that you won’t even find on the market. Some are ones Longwood explorers (and others) brought back from plant-hunting expeditions.

Others are common species that Longwood grows in crazy ways – like lantanas grown as mini-trees and trailing mums formed into giant hanging balls or trained up conservatory columns.

Longwood's back-stage production greenhouses.

Most of these horticultural gymnastics happen either in one of Longwood’s nine state-of-the-art production greenhouses or in its nearby back-stage nursery.

“Sometimes plants spend more time in the greenhouse than on display,” our guide, John, told us. “Sometimes it takes a few years to get them the size and shape we want.”

Once ready, some of the plants end up as long-term specimens, going for years on display. But a majority is rotated in and out of display with most of those ending up in Longwood’s rather hefty compost yard.

Lilies, for example, peak for only about 2 weeks, so they’re yanked and replaced about as fast as anything.

The thousands and thousands of annuals grown every summer in Longwood’s 600-foot-long Flower Garden Walk all get yanked and composted at season’s end. That’s when the following year’s spring bulbs go in, which, in turn, all get composted, too, when they’re done blooming to make way for the next display of annuals.

I was surprised to learn that Longwood generally doesn’t give away yanked plants or even prunings, for that matter, to staff, volunteers or anyone else.

For one thing, the gardens can use all of the compost material they can get because it all goes back on the acres and acres of garden beds.

For another, previous give-aways apparently got to be a headache with assorted people jockeying to get the same things. I can just imagine.

Longwood’s growers generally grow more of everything than they think they’re going to need because they know – like all gardeners – that a lot of unexpected things go wrong.

And even at Longwood, plant failures happen; bugs and diseases show up, and specimens get stomped or destroyed by one of its most troublesome animal pests, a smart-phone-toting species known as Visitorius longwoodii.

That’s not that big of a deal when a few salvias get smashed. But what happens when a storm rips the branches off of a specimen conifer or a sudden disease takes out a topiary?

John and some of Longwood's backup specimens.

“We pretty much have a backup for all the specimens,” John told us.

The only other place I’ve seen that was at Walt Disney World, where the back-stage nursery held a mirror collection of all the major plants throughout the theme parks.

Longwood’s production greenhouses are a pretty cool place. They’re equipped with all sorts of tricks of the trade and high-tech gizmos:

* Computers custom-mist and water each group of plants based on light and temperature readings.

* Growers can dial up any blend of seven different potting-mix ingredients for an on-demand product that’s perfect for every plant’s needs.

* A large cooling room chills bulbs and is used to slow flowers that are getting along faster than intended.

* Rubber tubing under the growing benches can be heated to give each plant the optimal soil temperature its roots prefer.

* Black shade cloths automatically roll out over the poinsettia house to make sure the plants get the 14 hours of uninterrupted darkness they need to color up.

* Even the plant labels are pretty impressive. They not only list the exact genus, species and cultivar of each plant, they tell where the plant is to be displayed, when it was started, when it needs to be ready and how many of them are needed.

One last thing I found interesting… how all of the work in a 1,077-acre garden gets done.

Longwood has about 400 paid staff, but that includes administration, gift shop, restaurant, maintenance and research in addition to the growers and gardeners.

The only way the plants manage to look as good as they do is because of the supplemental staff of some 800 volunteers. What usually happens is that a gardener gets a volunteer or two or three to form a lot of mini-teams that focus on whatever jobs need to be done that day in each area.

Now not all of those 800 put in a lot of time, but when you add it all up, Longwood estimates its volunteer workforce accounts for 30,000 hours of manpower per year.

I could use a little of that in my garden…

p.s. Longwood’s web site has a neat feature that lets you search out any of the plants in its ridiculously humongous collection. You can search for specific plants by name, characteristic or location, you can search out a particular statue, fountain or feature, and you can see what’s in bloom when.

To play around with that feature, go to http://plantexplorer.longwoodgardens.org/ecmweb/ECM_Home.html.

p.p.s. If you want to go on my next garden trip, it’s a day-tripper on Fri., Sept. 16, to see three of New Jersey’s best public gardens – the New Jersey Botanical Garden in Ringwood (a.k.a. “Skylands”), the 127-acre Frelinghuysen Arboretum near Morristown, and the 50 acres of trial gardens and specimen plants at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

The cost is $129, including lunch and admissions. To sign up, call Lowee’s at 717-657-9658 or email CKelly@lowees.com.