Longwood Gardens Reimagined

Throughout its history, Longwood has not just engaged but innovated around the art and science of garden making. Established within an ethic of conservation of both natural lands and designed landscapes – it is renowned for its horticultural skill. Among its botanical peers it is also uniquely a place that weaves theater, fine art, music, education and hospitality into the expression and experience of its lands and landscapes. In a time when awareness of the importance of public gardens to the mental and physical health of our communities is ever more urgent, we were thrilled to partner with Longwood on this expansive transformation that creates new places of meaning and that connect our communities more beautifully and more vitally to the natural world.

EXTENDING THE CRYSTALLINE RIDGE

Longwood Reimagined expands and refines a conservatory complex begun with Pierre S du Pont’s creation of the Main Conservatory in the 1920s. To fulfill the promise of a “Crystalline Ridge” envisioned in the 2010 master plan by West 8 with Weiss Manfredi, Reed Hilderbrand reshaped the high ground to create a newly continuous and accessible landscape of promenades, courtyards, groves and overlooks. Sweeping landforms on the side slopes host little bluestem meadows and connect the ridge landscape to the valley gardens. The expansive ridge landscape enriches the relationships between the conservatories and the wider landscape beyond, elevating the visitor experience throughout. A new West Conservatory makes the centerpiece of the Longwood Reimagined expansion, but is only one of many extraordinary destinations.

CONSERVATORY OVERLOOK

A new Conservatory Overlook offers sweeping views of the Main Fountain Garden and its summer fountain shows from broad cast stone step seating. 28 Yellowwood trees (Cladastris kentuckea) in two groves crown flexible lawns, giving scale to the space and offering welcome shade in hotter weather. Effectively a large green roof above Weiss Manfredi’s new restaurant and event space, the simple, elegant design navigates an incredibly complicated set of subsurface conditions. Soils excavated for the restaurant and event space were repurposed as planting soils for the meadow slopes that wrap the ridge.

The “lower level” of the space sets the 1906 restaurant and Fountain Room in a garden and defines a gracious zone between a carefully shaped boxwood hedge and building that allows events to spill outside. A ladder-like custom trellis hosts 27 espaliered southern magnolias while the 500-foot-long flowering herb bed below makes a culinary connection to the program inside and hosts an abundance of pollinators throughout the summer season.

RENEWING ROBERTO BURLE MARX’S CASCADE GARDEN

Opening to the public in 1992, The Cascade Garden is world renowned landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx’s (1909-1994) only extant work in North America and a stellar example of many of the signature elements within his ouevre. An active advocate for Brazil’s native landscapes, his design reinterpreted an existing desert house into an immersive expression of the beauty and fragility of the Brazilian rainforest.

The larger Longwood Reimagined project created the opportunity to relocate the garden to a place of greater prominence within Longwood’s collection of conservatories. Longwood Gardens and Reed Hilderbrand convened a team of experts to consult on the preservation approach for this unprecedented relocation which included Anita Berrizbeitia of the Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; Charles Birnbaum, founder and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation; Julio Ono and Gustavo Levias, of Studio Burle Marx, Raymond Jungles, landscape architect and friend of Burle Marx and James Brayton Hall, President of the Garden Conservancy. Together with Weiss Manfredi, the team outlined the preservation treatment that the project would follow.

The relocation required a new enclosure and Weiss Manfredi’s 3,800 square foot glass house delivers updated environmental and mechanical systems that provide a more appropriate and more responsive climate for the garden. The greater height of the enclosure also allows the plants to reach their full scale which was not previously possible.

Inside is an exacting reconstruction of the garden’s stone walls, cascading waterfalls, and clear pools, overseen by Reed Hilderbrand with preservation architects John Milner Associates. These elements provide the structure for a dense ensemble of rainforest plants, including bromeliads, philodendrons, tillandsia and more. Adjustments to the garden path were meticulously calibrated to meet contemporary accessibility standards without compromising the integrity of the garden’s design. A new entry courtyard brings guests to the garden’s upper entrance through a grove of magnolias and provides a place of rest and prospect.

BONSAI COURTYARD

The new Bonsai Courtyard is a 12,500 square-foot hedged garden and gallery for the display of Longwood’s distinguished collection, which includes 50 superlative specimens gifted to Longwood in 2022 by the Kennett Collection – the finest and largest private collection of bonsai and bonsai-related objects outside of Asia.

The Courtyard’s design employs a series of clipped hornbeam hedges to define the space and create rooms within it for quieter viewing. Yakisugi (charred wood) walls and carefully proportioned cypress pedestals at cast stone panels and within open pea stone areas offer multiple ways to curate the collection, allowing the display of dozens of bonsai at a time while highlighting their individual forms, foliage, and seasonal bloom.

The focused expression of craft in the garden’s details references both Japanese garden-making traditions and the artistry of the bonsai themselves. A grove of ten Yoshino cherry trees animate the garden, providing shade for guests and intimacy to the experience of the bonsai.

WEST CONSERVATORY TERRACE

At the westernmost point of the project, a ribbon of paving traces the gentle knoll on which sit eight 100-year-old London Plane trees. Working with Longwood’s arborist and our consultant team, we were able to save these stunning trees planted by Pierre DuPont. A destination moment in the project, the West Conservatory Terrace offers a large, flexible lawn that draws guests especially in the heat of summer, expansive views of seasonal change in the Abbondi Meadow to the west, and, of course spectacular sunsets at the end of each day.

VISITOR EXPERIENCE LANDSCAPE

The 17 acres of Longwood Reimagined also enrich the relationships between the Conservatories, new and old, and the wider landscape beyond, elevating the visitor experience throughout. In the character of Longwood’s historic landscape, trees provide the armature for moving to and among these new destinations in a variety of ways.