It’s been months since we headed out on our Longwood-Long-Weekend Journey, but I’ve finally had time to sit down and write a little about our adventure in garden heaven.

About five plus years ago, my job as part of being a graphic designer for a fashion company was to prep and do some location scouting for our lookbooks. Our team in the art dept had recently taken over the job of producing the lifestyle photos, so given our inspiration of gardens we set out looking for botanical gardens. Issue is - how do you fill a full catalog with one little botanical garden. In comes Longwood and their amazing botanical gardens that look amazing all year long. It wasn’t an easy sell (budget + travel-wise) but was the perfect setting in the end. Since that trip I was able to scoot up from Baltimore once while visiting a friend, but since both trips occurred in November, I didn’t get to explore the outdoors.

It’s almost a good thing, since the meadow was a recent addition to the amazing acreage at Longwood, and just up my alley.

As you can see here by the sign, they planted the meadow - giving it a kick start to bio-diversity from the get go, but then allowing it to naturalize over time. To think of the greenhouses filled with 150,000 plugs of wildflowers is kind of an amazing thing. I wonder if some digging into the internet would find us some progress photos of when it was first planted (I’ll add it to my list of to-dos).

We went right from checking in at our hotel to the meadow on day one, so it was our first longwood destination while there for the two days. I am so glad we did, because seeing it at golden hour was pretty kick-ass, if I say so myself. What I loved was that we saw portions in shade, in full sun and that in-between time. And, it was still hot-enough that we were almost alone the entire time.

I was really glad to see joe-pye-weed and milkweed along with grasses and other local flora, supporting the fauna as well. The field was buzzing with insect song along the path.

The details were quite lovely. I actually adored the fact that many of the signs were hand-written and not computerized. They seemed like a personal touch that allows you to see this as more of a field and less as an exhibit.

You can see the birdhouses were even designed with a green sedum roof. Add it to the wishlist for the future when I can help preserve acreage of wild meadows like this on my own land in the future.

And at the far side of the meadow was the farmhouse. An original stone farmhosue the crazy well-preserved little gem was gorgeous. It was story-book-esq.

I think my favorite part was seeing the meadow as not just land- but as a gorgeous little peek into what my personal heaven looks like. Add a bit of the ocean, a little veggie patch and outdoor dining area by the farmhouse and I could stay forever.