Fierce Foos and Festive Follies at Longwood Gardens

Happy December 1st! Yesterday I took a little day trip to Longwood Gardens, the farmhouse outside of Wilmington, Delaware formerly owned by Pierre Dupont (1870-1954), DuPont company and General Motors executive. The home was purchased from the Peirce family in the early 20th century to save the arboretum from ruins.

The gardens and conservatory are open year round, and each year, they put up a pretty extensive holiday display. The most lovely thing about the place is the way that they manage to combine this element of ruination with holiday festivity: the hanging vines, the aged stone, large glass windows- it's all extremely lovely, but not necessarily what you'd expect from an estate formerly owned by the meister of synthetics himself (think laminate flooring, herbicides, Lucite...). Ironic, no?

Highlights included some divine color schemes, highly unconventional cabbage trees (um, YES!), cacti filled Christmas-scapes (check out the bizarre white furry ones that look like little Yetis, please), fierce foos (LIFE-SIZE, no less!), sharply shorn hedges, a hanging succulent (literally) mosaic, and of course, the larger-than-life tree that was so organically situated amongst ruination.  What more could a girl ask for around the holidays?  Now, if only there were some way of replicating this same sort of haphazard vine-ridden delapadation in a living room...