Longwood Gardens

This week I went to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania while visiting Tim's family. I had been to this garden about 10 years ago when I was in college. For a few semesters I was in an amazing Ayuvedic medicine course and my instructor Dr. Patel took us out there to the botanical gardens. Its an amazing property bought and cultivated by Pierre du Pont back in the early 1900's. Its hard to describe if you've never been, you could walk around for hours and not see it all. Its like gardens of Versailles in Pennsylvania!

There was a particularly wonderful exhibit going on called: "Making Scents - the art and passion of fragrance". Throughout the garden scented plants were specially indicated and there were these neat sniffer devices on some displays. There were also some displays about scent extraction and a room full of perfume bottles and fragrance oils. And I could take pictures of it all! (I asked to be sure) Glass Perfume bottles are so gorgeous, with their precious contents...

When I was a little girl I was fascinated by my mother's perfume collection. So one time I took all the bottles down and poured a bit of each one into one bottle. I was creating my own custom scent! A little of this and a little of that... her expensive collection being wasted ridiculously! Until she smelled the horror wafting down the stairs and came up to see what I was doing. I was reminded of this experience as I wandered the beautiful room filled with perfume bottles. I recognized the no. 4711 - that was one of the perfumes in my mom's collection. She took me to Paris as a pre-teen and one of my most treasured memories is going into an old perfume shops. Shelves and shelves of au du toilettes. It was incredible, something I will never forget. I wanted to take them all home.