US: Chrysanthemums steal the show at Chrysanthemum Festival
Seriously Old School, as in ancient Asian – mostly Japanese – traditions of raising mums and using them to create spectacular forms shaped like spirals or meant to evoke the look of a pagoda.
And seriously Old School, as in Pierre du Pont, the industrialist who turned Longwood into a gardening mecca, focused on mums on the beginning.
"That sort of set the stage for an annual display," says Jim Sutton, Longwood's display designer.
This year's version of the annual show, the gateway show to A Longwood Gardens' Christmas, features 80,000 colourful blooms, including the 12-foot-wide and 10-foot-tall Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum, the largest in the world except for some 2,000 bloom plants in Japan.
"We can't get them that big," Sutton says.
But Longwood gets them awfully darn big: When the staff wheeled the Thousand Bloom plant into the conservatory, there was only 2 inches of clearance on each side of the plant in the north door, which is near the green wall of the bathroom corridor.
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