Longwood Gardens Reimagined

With the importance of public gardens to the mental and physical health of our communities ever more clear, this ambitious transformation of seventeen of Longwood Gardens’ most prominent acres answers the call. The expansive and technically complex renewal honors Longwood’s history as it imagines the gardens’ next century, reinforcing their belief (and ours) in a world where beauty is accessible to all.

Our work brings to life an ambitious plan to transform back-of-house areas including service paths, production greenhouses and parking lots, into a carefully sequenced, vibrant garden of gardens -- each with its own unique character. 

An Ambitious Transformation

Longwood Reimagined expands and refines a conservatory complex begun in 1921 with Pierre S du Pont’s Main Conservatory. Our work grounds an ambitious plan to locate three new buildings in a previously back-of-house area supporting production greenhouses, parking lots, and service areas by embedding them in a vibrant sequence of garden spaces, each with its own identity. 

Expanded Access

The project reshapes Longwood’s “Crystalline Ridge”, welcoming guests to new courtyards, expanded collections, elegant promenades, shady overlooks as well as the precedent-setting preservation of the Cascade Garden (Roberto Burle Marx’s only extant North American work) and a luminous new 32,000 sf Mediterranean garden-under-glass. Groves of canopy trees repeat throughout the project reinforcing the wider gardens’ historic structuring system and connecting Longwood’s future to its past. This expansive, and now fully accessible, landscape enriches the relationships between the conservatories and the wider site beyond, elevating the visitor experience throughout.

The Grand Promenade and Conservatory Overlook

A gracious new promenade stretches the 1,000-foot length of the project from east to west.  Opposite the Main Conservatory, a redesigned overlook offers sweeping views of the Main Fountain Garden and its summer fountain shows from broad cast stone steps. Twenty-eight Yellowwood trees (Cladastris kentuckea) crown flexible lawns, giving scale to the space and offering welcome shade in summer. Effectively a 31,600sf green roof above a new restaurant and event space designed by Weiss Manfredi Architects, the simple, elegant design navigates a complicated set of subsurface conditions. These groves and those of Accolade Elm to the west create a new continuous shaded overlook into the many gardens in the valley.

The South Slope

A critical structuring move for the project was the regrading of the ridge and related sideslopes. Here we lifted grade to re-establish the continuous plinth across the ridge. That move facilitated a fully accessible landscape including at-grade connections into all the buildings. The sweeping landforms of the side slopes host a little bluestem meadow punctuated by Kentucky Coffee Trees, American Hollies and Sweetbay Magnolias. Accessible paths accommodate both guests and maintenance movements, connecting the gardens on the ridge to those in the valley.

The Herb Garden

At the lower level of the Conservatory Overlook's double-height space, a 500-foot-long flowering herb bed lines the façade of the new restaurant -- setting its entrance in a garden and defining a gracious zone between the building façade and a cloud-formed boxwood hedge where events can spill outside. In summer, its masses of tiny flowers dematerialize the garden's structure and it becomes abuzz with abundant pollinators. Above the herb bed, a custom trellis supports twenty-seven espaliered Southern Magnolias that will one day connect across the 24-foot tall façade as a continuous, flowering green wall.

The Bonsai Courtyard

A 13,000 sf hedged garden offers a new home to one of the country’s premier collections, each element a lesson in this centuries-old practice founded on careful observation and deep patience. Previously displayed in an unprepossessing production house hallway, the collection now resides in a garden gallery at once expansive and intimate, allowing guests to experience these remarkable specimen up close for the first time.

In the Details 

The courtyard’s design employs a series of clipped hornbeam hedges to define the garden and create rooms within it for quieter viewing. Visitors meander through a composition of Yakisugi walls, cast stone panels and pea stone carve outs, taking in the individual forms, foliage, and seasonal bloom of the collection, while a grove of ten Yoshino cherry trees animate the garden, and provide shade to guests and bonsai alike. 

The Cascade Garden

The vision for the larger Longwood Reimagined project necessitated the relocation of the Cascade Garden, Roberto Burle Marx’s only extant work in North America. What first appeared as a challenge became an opportunity to give the garden a place of prominence within Longwood’s collection of conservatories. An active advocate for Brazil’s native landscapes, Burle Marx's original design interpreted the beauty and fragility of the Brazilian rainforest, connecting to Longwood’s own origin story in an act of conservation. This unprecedented approach to preservation—to relocate and reconstruct a garden-under-glass—sets a new standard for the care of historic gardens. 

Respect and Craft

The marble paving of the new entry courtyard is a quiet homage to Burle Marx's work and testament to the skill and attention to detail of the masons. Here, several teams worked in separate areas, swapping places periodically to ensure the pattern did not reveal discernible zones of patterning when complete. Precision and artistry was all the more important given an unforgiving setting bed that precluded rework. Success was based on the masons abilities and a close, bi-lingual relationship between our team and theirs developed throughout the build.

Innovation and Sustainability

Longwood has a long history of innovative engineering, extending from its inception and Pierre duPont’s interest in the behind-the-scenes mechanical systems that powered the garden fountains and tempered the climate within the conservatories. Longwood Reimagined is Longwood’s most ambitious and technologically advanced to date, turning the tools of engineering toward greater efficiency and a more environmentally sustainable system. 

Powered by a new geothermal field, the West Conservatory utilizes 300-foot-long earth ducts to passively draw air through the ground where it is cooled in summer, warmed in winter, and then distributed through vents in the pathways to temper the growing space and create greater comfort for visitors.

Reclaiming Water

The interior and exterior pools 350,000 gallons of water are continually recirculated through a biofiltration system supplemented by UV treatment. Water lost to transpiration is replaced by treated roof water collected in below-ground tanks south of the conservatory. Similar systems in the Cascade Garden allow Longwood to calibrate the environment to the needs of the plants in an integrated way for the first time. An expanded reclamation system gathers and retains water for use in toilet flushing.

The Plane Tree Grove

At the project’s western prospect, a ribbon of paving traces a gentle knoll. Here Longwood’s history meets its future in the shade of eight meticulously preserved 100-year-old London Plane Trees. A former staff parking lot now welcomes guests to gather in the shade of the heritage canopy and witness the glow of remarkable sunsets over the Abbondi, one of Longwood’s expansive conservation meadows.

Places for People

The project of public gardens is in equal parts about knowledge and beauty. Today, the passing of an ethic around the opportunity and responsibility in creating and caring for our natural places feels ever more urgent. The work is gleefully also about bringing communities together, fostering well-being, sparking imagination and delivering joy. This transformational project brings Longwood into its next century with a clear-eyed and equal focus on both.