Longwood weekend

We spent the better part of the weekend at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, about a 45-minute drive from Philadelphia. (Click the picture to reach some 60 frames of flowery squeefulness)

Longwood is a 1,050 acre estate-turned-foundation, owned by Pierre S. du Pont, who shepherded both E. I. du Pont de Nemours and General Motors to enormous financial success -- and who had the last two years of his life made hideous, I'm sure, by testifying at federal anti-trust hearings. He died in April 1954, less than two months after his last testimony. He didn't marry until relatively late in life, when he married his first cousin, herself past her child-bearing years. Longwood was their passion, and a testimony to what might happen to a garden when an M.I.T. graduate has gobs of money to spend. Mr. du Pont made all the calculations for the hydraulics for the complex fountains himself. He did not envision the estate as a bastion of botanical research but rather as a place to entertain his friends, his employees, his neighbors, and the public.

This weekend was the opening of Longwood's first exhibition (as opposed, of course, to showy displays of plants) -- "Making Scents: The Art and Passion of Fragrance." For this exhibition, the Music Room adjacent to the eastern conservatory was dedicated to displays of the tools of the perfumer's trade (including a reproduction "scent organ," with banks of vials arranged by top, middle, and bass notes of fragrance), a short video, and three "mix your own perfume" stations where the visitor can sample nine scents and then combine a top, middle, and bass note, which is then printed as a scratch-and-sniff panel. (Roy made three!)

Additional displays throughout the conservatory showcase particular plants used in perfume, their role in history, the process of breeding for fragrance and the chemistry of extracting the essences. For our multimedia, attention-deficit age, having smaller displays interspersed with other plants strikes me as more effective than one large exhibition. It did not, however, give my nose a chance to clear and I was pretty overstimulated, scent-wise, by the time we'd made it through the greenhouses.

Meanwhile, in the home garden and windowsills, I still have five blooms on the Nopalxochia, and the second seedpod on Hippeastrum 'gervase' appears to be all right, despite the first one collapsing. I've installed a half dozen pansies and a half dozen dusty miller in the back beds, noting that the pansies I purchased are the very same 'charon' pansies that didn't germinate.

We also noted something alarming/annoying in the back. The Scamp was alerting on a corner of the yard, sitting and staring intently at the ground. When I went over to investigate, I found what appears to be a freshly-dug rat hole! Roy has installed some rat-b-gone, and I hope the poor thing(s) don't suffer too much when they eat it and die. Roy also filled in the top of the tunnel and covered it with a few bricks. Sigh...