Longwood Gardens consists of 1,077 acres of dazzling displays of great horticultural designs ranging from formal to natural in gardens, greenhouses, meadows, and woodlands in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

I have to start off by saying I did not expect what I saw at Winterthur. I had initially thought it would be a nice gilded age house museum, where you tour and admire different rooms filled with paintings and antiques. Instead, what I experienced in the former home of Henry Francis du Pont, was an extensive collection of American decorative arts in 175 rooms with over 90,000 individual objects on an estate with 1,000 natural garden acres of rolling hills, streams, meadows and forests.

Nemours, the former 300-acre estate of Alfred I. du Pont, is named after the du Pont ancestral home in north central France. The 102-room French chateau-style mansion, designed by Carrere and Hastings, and built between 1909 and 1910, was a gift from Alfred to his second wife, Alicia.