Apples for Christmas
December 17th, 2013
It’s incredible what you can do with 18,540 apples.
Longwood’s floating apple tapestry.
If you’re Longwood Gardens and have a marble ballroom floor the size of a basketball court, you can make a “floating apple tapestry” out of them.
I’d never seen anything quite like it before last week, and if you haven’t either (but would like to), you’ve got until Jan. 12.
The apple tapestry is the highlight of this year’s A Longwood Christmas, the 1,050-acre garden’s annual holiday extravaganza.
The display starts with a plywood pattern that you can’t see. It’s fitted with a 6-inch-high fence in a tapestry pattern and laid on the marble floor, now obscured by apples.
Four Longwood gardeners then spent a day laying red ‘Rome’ apples inside the fence and green ‘Granny Smith’ apples outside the fence to create a tapestry pattern.
A short Plexiglas fence surrounds the perimeter in a rectangular form to keep the ‘Granny Smiths’ contained.
The last step was flooding the floor with 4 inches of water to make the apples float.
The result? A red and green tapestry of floating apples.
You never know for sure what’s going to happen when you try something novel like this. It’s even an adventure for folks of Longwood caliber.
One of the staffers told me the biggest concern is overdoing it with water and having the apples float over top of the low fences. It’d be like letting the horses out of the barn.
That’s a weekly concern, too, since the water is drained and replaced once a week to keep it fresh.
To discourage rotting and water-logging, a thin layer of wax was applied to the bottom of the apples. That’s worked out pretty well because staff has had to replace only about 100 apples so far.
The apples came from Bear Mountain Orchards, a 75-year-old family-owned fruit-grower in Aspers, Adams County.
Once the show is over, the apples will be put to good use as cattle feed.
If you go, get timed tickets ahead of time because December is Longwood’s most-visited month, and the place often sells out around the holidays.
Christmas 2013 in the Longwood Conservatory.
The floating apple tapestry is just one part of A Longwood Christmas 2013.
Lots of people go every year to see the changing plant decor, which this year features red begonias, white and blue hydrangeas, and lilies, poinsettias, cyclamens and paperwhites galore in the main conservatory room.
A big fir tree next to a water feature in the East Conservatory is decorated with large, blown-glass pear ornaments, while the Music Room has become a replica of the Green Room at Wilmington’s Hotel duPont.
Kids especially like the outdoor garden railway with trains running through a live landscape with a waterfall centerpiece.
Be sure to stay after dark because that’s when the gazillion outdoor lights turn the trees into botanical light specimens.
The dancing, lighted water jets in action.
My favorite attraction is the dancing fountains in the Outdoor Theater. After 3:30 each day, shows go off every 5 minutes in which water jets of changing light shoot up in sync to Christmas music.
Coming to Longwood next summer is a new outdoor garden, by the way. It’s going to be a large meadow garden toward the right rear of the one-time estate of Pierre duPont, featuring both dry-land and wet-soil wildflowers.
I always tell people there’s never a bad day to visit Longwood. This place always has plenty to see and do, which is one reason I still rate it as my favorite public garden of all time anywhere.
Check out the floating apples before Jan. 12 because this beautiful creation will become cow dessert on Jan. 13.
If you leave there hungry for apple pie, though, don’t say I didn’t warn you.