North America’s largest Chrysanthemum Festival at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square is returning to delight visitors from Oct. 24 through Nov. 16, writes Tenielle Jordison for Homes & Gardens.
Every fall, the festival features colossal floral art exhibitions and dazzling installations, with chrysanthemums of every color covering every inch of vertical space.
“We preserve over 200 cultivars of chrysanthemums for this show in tissue culture, and we grow them out each year,” said Jim Sutton, Associate Director of Display Design for Longwood Gardens. “They’re all exhibition mums, not garden mums. These are your big football mums, incurves, and your spiders. We also have cascade mums that we collected from Japan in the 60s.”
At the festival, mums take on 66 specialty forms. Iconic spheres suspended from the ceilings are accompanied by towering columns also covered in mums.
The crown jewel of the festival is the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum, known as Ozukuri in Japan. It is grown using a historic technique to produce just a single large mum with as many blooms as possible, often exceeding 1,000.
The display debuted at Longwood Gardens in 2009 and is now the festival’s central feature each year.
Read more about the Chrysanthemum Festival coming to Longwood Gardens at the end of the month in Homes & Gardens.
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