Longwood Gardens’ Massive New Re-Do

March 1st, 2021

   It’s hard to imagine Longwood Gardens getting much bigger or better.

Here’s a rendering of Longwood’s conservatory complex re-do.
Credit: Longwood Gardens

   This magnificent botanical legacy of industrialist Pierre du Pont already graces 1,100 acres of Chester County countryside with elegant formal gardens, fountains that rival Versailles, a meadow garden that alone covers 86 acres, and just about every plant cultivated for garden use.

   It draws a million or more visitors every year from around the world… and deservedly so.

   Of the hundreds of public gardens I’ve seen, I can’t name any that I like better or that are more impressive than Longwood.

Order George’s new e-book on “50 American Public Gardens You Really Ought to See”

   Armed with a very healthy endowment from du Pont, Longwood isn’t done growing and improving.

   In case you haven’t heard, Longwood is about to embark on the biggest single improvement project since the Gardens were created more than a century ago – a three-year, $250-million redo and expansion of Longwood’s conservatory complex.

   The project will add a new West Conservatory the size of a football field, move an entire iconic garden out of the existing conservatory into its own new glasshouse, and add a new restaurant overlooking the flagship Main Fountain Garden.

   Longwood CEO Paul Redman calls it a “massive project and the most complicated project we’ve ever embarked upon… It’ll be a new garden experience like none other.”

   Longwood and most of the existing 17-acre conservatory complex will remain open during the work, which is scheduled to be done and open to the public in the fall of 2024.

   The $250 million price-tag dwarfs the $90 million revamping of the Main Fountain Garden, which was completed in 2017.

Longwood’s renovated Main Fountain Garden.

   Both projects are part of Longwood’s 2010 “A World Apart” master plan that laid out 40 years’ worth of growth and improvement ideas.

   “We’re dreaming really big,” Redman said, describing the new project as “equal parts expansion and preservation.”

   Du Pont bought what had been a small farm and Colonial-era arboretum in 1906, mainly to save the trees from being cut and sold for lumber. In the ensuing decades, he turned the land into one of the world’s great gardens, leaving it after his death in 1954 with an endowment that’s grown into the multi-millions.

   The centerpiece of the new project, being dubbed “Longwood Reimagined: A New Garden Experience,” is a new, 32,000-square-foot West Conservatory, designed by the project’s lead architect, Weiss/Manfredi of New York.

   Redman says the conservatory will “seemingly float on a pool of water, its asymmetrical peaks rising up to the sky.”

A rendering of the planned new West Conservatory.
Credit: Weiss/Manfredi, Reed Hilderbrand

   The gardens inside, being designed by the New England-based Reed Hilderbrand firm, will have a Mediterranean flair, featuring pools, canals, low fountains, and plants such as aloes, laurels, and flowering acacia, cypress, and olive trees.

   A second big project will be giving a new home to the tropical Cascade Garden created in 1992 by the famous Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx – the only garden Burle Marx designed in North America.

   This whole garden with its waterfalls, 35 tons of rock, pools, palms, bromeliads, and philodendrons will move to a new 3,800-square-foot glasshouse.

   A third new feature will be a walled-in outdoor Bonsai Courtyard that will house the planned expansion of Longwood’s bonsai collection. It’ll give much more space for visitors to view this Oriental botanical art form.

   And a fourth new addition will be a 6,100-square-foot restaurant with another 5,600 square feet of event space carved into the conservatory hillside opposite and overlooking the Main Fountain Garden.

   The restaurant will feature furniture crafted from fallen Longwood trees along with trellis-like ceiling vaults and elements that echo features of the Main Fountain Garden.

A rendering of the Waterlily Court.
Credit: Weiss/Manfredi, Reed Hilderbrand

   Other phases of the project will include renovation and preservation of the current Orchid House and Banana House, an expansion of the existing education and administration building (including a state-of-the-art library and new classrooms), a redo of the Waterlily Court, and new landscaping around the conservatory grounds.

   Work is to begin this week with the temporary closing of the Orchid and Banana Houses for renovation. Those are scheduled to reopen this fall in time for Longwood’s 2021 year-end holiday display – making them the first finished parts of the project.

   Both the Main and East Conservatories are to remain open throughout the transformation.

   Part-by-part descriptions of each phase along with a video tour of the project are posted on the Longwood Reimagined web page.