Marie-Louise Meyers

After leaving the East Conservatory where you met with a profusion of colorful and varied plants and flowers, prepare for an abrupt change 

where everything seems fused with subtle undertones like a diffused rainbow, greeted in the courtyard by the embrace of ginkgo trees leading you to the Openness of the West Conservatory. Here the air changes as asymmetrical crystalline peaks rise from the pools to the sky as if floating.

Water seems to be the guiding theme of this seamless experience, the fluid conduit where connecting wild and cultivated places with hanging baskets and espaliered Kumquats and palm trees flourish.  Like a reinvention of Glass Houses, the outside is drawn in where engineering takes you to a new sensation of floating in space.  

Within the Grove, a virtual showplace for a collection of books on Horticultural and historical references to Longwood as well as offices and rooms for continuing education.

You regain your footing in the Bonsai Courtyard with an expanded opportunity to view the exceptional ingenuity and patience involved in starting the transformation of an ordinary tree to a dwarfed Object d’Art.

Here they can be viewed not in a narrow passageway but given their own unique space to truly appreciate from every angle without glass intervening.

Few guests entered the Potting Shed before, now the Bonsai Work Shop, an inviting place, tying the past with the present with tracks painted on the floor once leading to the freight elevator and to the Green Houses, as if a continuance from the Historic Old to the Innovative New.  

Enter the Cascade Garden and rediscover the tranquil beauty restored with the profoundness of even more bromeliads, more at the Waterfalls, considered a Stopping Place for Picture Taking but now even more for you to hesitate with camera in hand.

(This spring, the Waterlily Court will be unveiled where obsidian pools will greet with floating foliage including one hundred varieties of both hardy and tropical waterlily specimens.)  

Stop if you have time and inclination at the 1906 Restaurant and Fountain Room for another experience, a new space of taste and decor overlooking the iconic Main fountain Garden featuring “bespoke” furniture crafted by nonprofit locals using reclaimed wood from Longwood trees.  

The air and hue has changed to a softer Mediterranean with its trees and plants, your senses infused with unrestricted sight from water to sky, the soft arousal of bubbles ever renewing with floating plants within. 

In this time of crisis on many fronts, for humans to co-exist, and even transcend the common ground of every day events, they need to touch that hidden place within reserved for beauty and grace.  

You’ll find it here within the borders of Longwood’s West Conservatory where you’ll experience all of the sensory arousal with sight unrestricted and unveiled from water to sky with the allusion of floatation to take you there as if a dream fulfilled.