Martha Just Visited a Dazzling Chrysanthemum Festival—Featuring a Mum With 1,000 Blooms

Chrysanthemums, often referred to as mums, are the fall flower. They're often seen adorning porches and filling seasonal displays from September through November, making them a gardening staple this time of year.

Last week, Martha visited the colorful mum display at the Chrysanthemum Festival at Longwood Gardens, which is home to a diverse array of botanical collections spanning 1,100 acres.

Each year, the Gardens showcase one of North America's largest and oldest collections of chrysanthemums. More than 200 cultivars—from big football-sized mums to incurves to spider chrysanthemums planted in spheres, pagodas, towers, and more—are on display.

Visitors can view samples of each of the 13 classes of chrysanthemums defined by bloom shape and bred for color, size, and unique form. Martha shared photos from her visit, including some of the interesting blooms she saw, in a recent blog post.

One of those, the Crimson Tide, is a bold, irregular heirloom chrysanthemum with dramatic, two-toned blooms in deep crimson red and bronze, and incurved petals that are ideal for creating rich fall bouquets. Another standout mum, the King’s Delight, has needle-like petals that resemble quills. They grow upright on strong stems that reach about 12 to 18 inches tall.

One plant, though, was the highlight of the show—a yellow incurve chrysanthemum called Susono-no-Hikari. More than a thousand blooms were produced using a centuries-old Japanese technique in which a single stem is trained to grow in a massive dome shape with hundreds of perfectly placed blooms. It took the team at Longwood more than 18 months to train and nurture this particular plant. It's the biggest of its kind outside Asia.

The plant was guided through a labor-intensive, multi-step process of pinching, tying, disbudding, and shaping using a supporting frame, so that each large flower is evenly spaced apart. Every year, the team begins by growing 10 plants that could be contenders for the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum that will eventually go on display during the festival.

If you're in or near Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, stop by and visit the Chrysanthemum Festival at Longwood Gardens to see the spectacular display, now through November 16. The Gardens are open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily (except Tuesdays). Timed admission tickets are required.