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-Fairyland is not a myth, after all!

It exists at Longwood,

the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Pierre S. du Pont

in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania,

where our cameras traveled for the premiere

of the illuminated fountains, which can safely be called

the most spectacular night displays on this continent,

if not, perhaps, in the entire world.

Spectators were afforded a splendid view

of this kaleidoscopic play of color

as jets of water mounted into the air

and were wafted away in a rainbow mist.

Each display is lighted with five colors:

red, blue, green, amber, and white.

But, oh! Just five colors can be combined

to create a multicolor feast for the eyes!

The fountain garden occupies a space

of perhaps a city square and the work of laying out

the fountains and surrounding landscapes

has been in progress for the past two years.

The Longwood Gardens of Mr. And Mrs. Pierre S. du Pont,

already a byword for almost unimaginable beauty,

have been a given a fresh

and immeasurably more elaborate charm

with this new addition

of this veritable Fairyland of fountains.

To grasp their beauty and grandeur,

you must see it for yourself!

-When Mr. du Pont turned this garden on first, in 1931,

people had never seen anything like that.

People weren't used to seeing

a lot of colored fountains back then.

There had been a few, but nothing quite like this.

-I remember Uncle Pierre said

he had some new fountains to show people.

We stood there with my mother and father and sisters

and it was so big, you had to turn your head

all the way one way

and turn it around all the way the other way.

And there were still fountains coming up and lights on them

and they shot way up in the air.

It was just unbelievable.

-Mr. du Pont really enjoyed the idea of the garden as theater

and, of all the gardens at Longwood,

this is the most theatrical.

Longwood is about 1,077 acres.

Of that, five acres are devoted to this particular garden,

the Main Fountain Garden, so it's one of the most

complete collections of fountains in the country.

It involves elements of architecture,

being all this stonework;

water, being all the fountains;

and a tremendous number of plants:

the trees, the boxwood, the grass, everything.

Together, it forms what I think is

the most significant fountain garden in the United States.

-The fountains have been working nonstop since 1931.

We're really fortunate that the fountains have lasted

as long as they have.

-In many gardens, fountains are the first things to go.

There's so much active elements there:

the water coursing through the pipes

and the pipes rusting and then breaking, so.

Typically, when you go to Europe and you see old gardens,

it's a miracle that the fountains are working

and, in many of those gardens, they have put a lot

of concerted effort into restoring the fountains,

so, that's exactly what we're doing here.

-It's the original fountain heads,

jets, the original pumps, pipes.

It's time to let her rest, so to speak,

and bring her back to life.

-Good morning, everyone.

This morning is a special morning

to observe and watch the fountains for the last time

before we shut them down for the next 2.5 years

to begin this important revitalization.

-I think that preservation is

one of the only ways that we can make sure that

what we have today is here for future generations.

Preservation, to me, just has a lot of meaning.

A connection that I can have to someone

who built things 200 years ago or more,

I think, is wonderful.

I'm like a doctor for masonry, essentially.

I take what's old and dilapidated-looking

and fix it up and put a patch here,

a patch there, and make it whole again.

-We're recreating Pierre du Pont's 1930s garden,

which he had sort of borrowed heavily

from the mid-16th and later historic gardens of Europe.

This is kind of collision of old and new,

which is creating this real dynamism on the project.

-With kind of a world, now, where you tear things down a lot

and build new, rather than trying to figure out ways

to make it work, I think that

figuring out the way to make it work

is kind of a fun project and a challenge.

-I physically went and touched

and got to know every single piece of stone.

There are 4,392 pieces of stone.

I measured them, I photographed them,

and I determined exactly

what repair works was needed to each stone

and then, that took about six months

and that was compiled into a 500-page book,

which was then given to the contractors,

so that they could price and start the work.

-The scope of this project is based almost 100%

dismantle of the stone, which will then be crated

and brought back to our office in Conshohocken.

Onsite, first, we did some general cleaning,

which included water misting

and a light rinse and scrubbing of all the pieces of stone.

-This is pretty much the first phase.

We're bringing as much dirt

and biological components to the surface.

It's really neat to see what they did back then.

Very just natural, done by hand,

a lot of skill involved, a lot of labor involved.

Makes you appreciate what you do now

to help preserve it, so.

-We have thousands and thousands of pieces.

The biggest keyword on this project is organization.

As we remove each piece of stone, we'll number it,

we'll put a tag on it, and then we'll crate it.

What's scary is making sure that everything,

when we dismantle it, comes apart in one piece.

It's scary and exciting, at the same time.

-Imagine Versailles being built today.

People just don't build stuff like this anymore.

We are not just going to make it look pretty again.

After we disassemble the entire garden,

we're just gonna take the top of it and peel it right back

and then we're gonna install all-new infrastructure

that's appropriate for the 21st century,

that, hopefully it'll bring

another 100-plus years of life to this fountain garden.

It is, by far, the largest project we've ever done.

-I'm the conductor.

This is my orchestra.

You hear the music? It's a beautiful sound, isn't it?

It's a major historical revitalization.

It's gonna be a huge undertaking.

A lotta guys onsite,

major hauling and excavation and just trucks after trucks

runnin' in and out with materials,

deliveries comin' in.

Oh, this is construction.

You gotta love construction.

-The connecting thread of this project

is Pierre du Pont.

A project like this is walking the tightrope

and you really have a couple of paths that you can take.

You can have the long arm coming from the grave

and you could restore it perfectly in kind.

You could create the exact garden again.

That was not an option for us.

If our founder was still around today,

he would want to have the latest technology, the best technology,

and he would want to explore the landscape

in a way to improve it.

Because he was so innovative, he wanted to be on the edge,

we realized that we wanted to be on the edge,

with a reborn and revitalized Main Fountain Garden.

-Every time the question came up, "What should we do?"

In the room where we had most of our meetings,

there's a portrait of Pierre

and I point to that picture and I say,

"If Uncle Pierre were alive today, what would he do?"

-The first thing you would notice about Uncle Pierre was

that he had no hair.

The sun would shine off of the top of his head

and my mother said, "Well, that's his halo."

-My Great-Uncle Pierre was a person of great focus.

-The man had an incredible

mathematical and scientific mind.

-He certainly was skilled as an engineer,

as a chemist, skilled as a financial planner.

-With all the things he accomplished in his life,

he was not a very overpowering, pompous kind of person.

He was very quiet, shy.

-There was the industrial side of him, the business side;

and then there was the Longwood side.

He was a fun man.

He had a wonderful, dry sense of humor.

-Had had a touch of polio as a child,

so that he sometimes would walk with a little bit of a limp.

-Not very tall, a little bit round, very sweet face.

-Cared about the community and had a very kind heart.

-My father would talk about him as being

kind of larger-than-life and full of respect and love.

- Uncle Pierre was my hero.

-Pierre Samuel du Pont is born January 15, 1870.

He is the third of 11 children, the first boy,

born to Lammot and Mary Belin du Pont.

The du Pont family settles in Delaware

and builds a prosperous enterprise

out of the hazardous task of making gunpowder.

Pierre's passion for fountains is awakened in Philadelphia

when, at six years old,

he attends the 1876 Centennial Celebration.

He's captivated by the water display he sees there.

It's called the Great Cascade.

It's a mini Niagara Falls system of pumps,

designed to demonstrate the sheer energy of hydraulic power.

It is thrilling, beyond anything he can imagine.

-Pierre's father, Lammot du Pont was a big, strong man,

a soccer player, you know, a rugged individualist,

and he felt that his sons should be the same.

Well, Pierre wasn't, either in terms

of his physical attributes or his mental disposition.

What he really wanted to do was study the piano,

so, Pierre made a secret pact with his sister and said,

"Tell you what, if I do this for you,

will you let me take your piano lessons?"

And so they did and they kept it from their father for some time.

-Throughout his life, Pierre thrills to the sights

and adventures provided by world's fairs and expositions

that promote cutting-edge technologies

and inspiring artistic environments.

When he is 19, Pierre joins his brothers and sisters,

his mother, and two maids on a grand trip to Europe.

Their trip includes Paris,

where they visit the famed Universal Exposition of 1889.

They experience the debut of the Eiffel Tower

and a fantastic outdoor fountain display.

-So, they used all the latest technology to light it

and the chronicles talk about how it was like

diamonds and rubies and emeralds, so,

for 1889, this was pretty spectacular.

-In 1893, Pierre is delighted

by the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The giant world's fair boasts neoclassical architecture

and huge pools with fountains.

On either side of the central fountain,

there are two smaller fountains,

that are electrically illuminated.

These fountains provide the inspiration

for colored water at Longwood.

Pierre was inspired by the theatrical experience

made possible by the marriage of art and cutting-edge science.

-This was part of an overall trend of industrial exhibitions

using the latest technology to illuminate water,

using pumps to throw it up into the air,

and then using electricity and arc lamps to color it,

so it was an early form of fiber optics

and the public had never seen anything like it.

-In 1901, Pierre visits the Pan-American Exhibition

in Buffalo, New York;

and, in 1904, he is wowed by a huge central pool

with fountains, waterfalls, and fireworks

at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.

-The two things that he really loved were

gardens and industrial world's fairs,

and he combined both of those at Longwood.

-The most magnificent thing out there, visually, is sunlight

and the second-most magnificent thing out there, visually,

is water.

Everything else is third-class.

To me, it's the inherent mechanical beauty of water

and the fact that we all really do seek beauty.

We're in Los Angeles.

This is our design studio here, at Fluidity.

We have a lot of other, really wonderful,

celebrated projects, in places like Dallas or Dubai,

but the Main Fountain Garden is a one-of-a-kind,

very special, very important project.

Part of what makes it so rich and interesting

is having inherited such a kind of noble beginning.

What we're trying to do is,

through the theater of the place,

convey the magic of the garden,

and there's a lot more to that than engineering.

It's very technically challenging,

with really complex, physical puzzles,

and it has beautiful, elegant, artistic puzzles as well.

It uses both art and science to get there,

or, more fundamentally, it uses aesthetics and physics.

We try to make the display itself so fascinating

that you forget those complications

and you're just wrapped.

We wanted to totally change the kind of images

that the water could paint in space,

from compositions to transforming motion objects,

and we wanted to radically improve the color.

It won't look like, you know, a dime-store electric sign.

It's gonna look like a...

dragon rolling in a field,

just dreaming.

That's what it's gonna be like.

-Pierre's attraction to the theatrical

flowers at an early age.

When his family moves to West Philadelphia

to be closer to his father's new enterprise,

the Repauno Chemical Company in Gibbstown, New Jersey,

12-year-old Pierre becomes friendly with a neighbor

roughly his age, a boy named Frederick Parrish,

soon to be known as the celebrated

illustrator and painter Maxfield Parrish.

Parrish creates a miniature papier-mâché stage,

a foundation for their theatrical adventures,

an affection Pierre retains and shares with others

for the rest of his life.

In 1884, a massive explosion

tears through the Repauno Chemical Company.

Five men are killed, including Pierre's father.

Lammot was 53.

He left behind his wife, Mary, and 10 children.

Pierre, just 14 years old,

becomes the acknowledged head of the family,

a helpmate to his mother

and surrogate father to his siblings.

From that moment on, his brothers and sisters,

even his older sister Louisa, called him Daddy.

-Pierre du Pont, above everything else,

had a certain level of creativity.

Much of what went into the building

of the Main Fountain Garden was new.

There were pump systems that you could not find comparable

anywhere, at the time.

He came up with a early-20th-century technology

to mimic 17th-and 18th-century water gardens he saw in Europe

and what we're doing here is coming up

with 21st-century technology

to sustain his 20th-century vision.

We want to redesign, restore it in the spirit of du Pont.

We always ask ourself, "What would Pierre do?"

Historically, whenever there's a problem with the system,

there be a breakage of any of the pipes,

they would have to do all the maintenance from above.

-When I started, 27 years ago,

there was no maintenance plan for the Main Fountain Garden.

If we had a problem underground, we were digging.

-They'd excavate. They'd have to cut off

that part of the garden.

It'd be very disruptive to the guest experience.

The introduction of tunnels, all underground,

allow maintenance and repairs

to take place outside the view of the guests.

-And you'll be able to go through a tunnel

to service all the piping that's gonna feed all the fountains

and these tunnels are pre-cast concrete,

roughly 12-foot by 12-foot, 8 feet long,

weighing in excess of 60,000 to 70,000 pounds apiece,

and they will go in like an Erector Set:

one piece after another, locking together.

-The tunnel system at the Main Fountain Garden

is really the backbone of the entire garden system:

all the water piping, the electrical conduit,

the propane lines will all run within this,

and it provides the access point to all of the fountain services.

These tunnels look very expansive, 15 feet wide.

By the time we're done,

the walkway's maybe 4 or 5 feet wide,

only because it'll be so full of equipment.

So, this whole thing is an interconnected,

underground network, which brings

the Main Fountain Garden into the 21st century.

-Pierre graduates from William Penn Charter School

in 1886

and enrolls in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His days are filled with chemistry,

though he plays the piano nearly every night.

Pierre graduates from MIT in 1890, well-trained

in the ways of modern science and technology.

His career at DuPont begins.

Pierre earns $80 a week as an assistant

to the company's chief chemist and inventor, Francis Gurney.

He stays for nine years, without a promotion,

and becomes frustrated

by the lack of opportunity for advancement at DuPont,

so Pierre takes a leap and moves to Ohio

to become president of the Johnson Company,

a steel-rail-producing company in Ohio,

but he doesn't stay away for too long.

Three years later, he joins his cousins

Alfred Irénée and Thomas Coleman,

and they purchase DuPont.

The new generation of leaders successfully transform

their family's century-old gunpowder business

into a modern-day explosives empire.

-Anytime there's a successful person in the world,

history tends to rewrite the dialogue,

such that we all think that

a sword was pulled out of a stone

and it was ordained and he just did great things.

It really wasn't that way.

He took risks.

He worked hard.

Success was not assured.

But, through the daily struggles,

I mean, he really made something lasting.

"I have recently experienced

what I would formerly have diagnosed

as an attack of insanity,"

Pierre jokes in a letter to a friend in 1906...

"that is, I've purchased a small farm

about ten miles from here.

As I've always considered the purchase of real estate

a sign of mental derangement...

I fear that my friends may be looking for permission

to inquire into my condition.

However, I believe the purchase worth the risk,

"for my farm is a very pretty little place."

This pretty little place is known as Peirce's Park,

an arboretum of sorts.

It's home to a significant collection of unusual trees,

cultivated by brothers Joshua and Samuel Peirce

in Chester County, PA.

Pierre's purchase rescues Peirce's Park

from a local lumber company,

a defensive purchase, to save the trees.

Pierre, 36 years old, is still a bachelor,

living at home with his mother.

His days are dominated by the massive restructuring

of the DuPont Company

and his evenings are spent dreaming about his new property.

He renamed Peirce's Park Longwood.

-In our today world,

with computers and Internet and apps,

but also with the bombardment of commercial illusions,

we are craving authenticity and for a sort of antidote.

-Gardens are a constant rebirth.

It's both relaxing and inspiring.

-People want a place to be together which is more pleasant,

more pleasurable, more welcoming,

and be a place where you share memories.

I think that's why Longwood exists.

-So, Longwood is known for these spectacular gardens,

really the "wow" factor,

and the Main Fountain Garden hasn't always been

the most inviting space at Longwood,

so we really, fundamentally, wanted to improve

the guest experience in the garden

and create this green oasis.

-What's really interesting is that the original garden,

it was really Mr. du Pont and his engineer Phil Brewer,

two people, making all of those decisions.

So, here it is 2017, and it's taking an army

of design professionals to make those decisions

and to help guide our discussions.

-I think, as a landscape architect,

there's very few projects like this,

where you get an opportunity

to make something that's gonna last generations

and make so many people so happy.

There are no constraints in the design of a garden.

It can be fantastical and it can be experimental.

For a project like this, which is very rooted

in the legacy of an individual, there are some things

which are sort of clear where you wanna go.

You wanna stay with the spirit of du Pont

and adhere to what you knew his values were,

but then there are things that we had to invent.

-This fountain garden was made from concrete and grass

and had railings

and so we thought, "We need to introduce

a sort of French-style tactility,"

so it was a whole repertoire, from crushed-gravel edges,

stone, the water hedges, trees, vegetation on the walls.

They are very small changes,

but, together, they make a relationship

between American style and the French style.

-And we made a conscious decision not

to pick plants that bloom vividly,

but what we wanna do is use those plants

to really highlight all the gorgeous architecture

and not draw attention to itself, but enhance it.

-You can have beautiful eyes, but, with eyeliner

or with makeup, you can do something with it,

which is not undermining the beauty of the eye;

it's even lifting it.

If we can do that with the fountain garden,

then you have the same design, the same layout,

but it is more dramatic.

-I think the guest will enjoy the alley of trees.

You're on the gravel path.

You hear the crunch of the gravel.

There's a beautiful bench that you can linger.

Similar to if you're walking through a park in Paris.

I think it's going to be a totally different experience

than it was in the past.

When people come to Longwood,

I think they're looking for some peace and quiet.

Today's world is so chaotic,

and it's rare that you can go somewhere

and just listen and take a deep breath.

-It's a chance to look at beautiful things,

to wonder how they develop them,

to think about what you could do in your own backyard,

to think about what you could do in your little city plot.

-I've seen people down on their hands and knees,

with magnifying glasses, looking into a flower,

you know, seeing what it is and why it is.

-So, it's inspiration and it's release.

-A garden can be just a place of quiet enjoyment

or you can have performances and firework shows and fountains

that bring them to life in unique and exciting ways.

This site is large enough

that you can do both at the same time.

-It's really about bringing beauty into people's lives.

I believe that that's a fundamental need.

It's as important as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

-I think my Great-Uncle Pierre would get no greater joy

than seeing so many people,

1.4 million people, in fact, enjoying Longwood every year.

It's kind of amazing, when you think about it,

in this world of Instagram and Facebook,

that people put down their phones for a moment

and enjoy these incredible gardens.

-It's a place to enjoy together.

You want to saunter through.

You don't want to rush through.

You wanna allow enough time to visit all parts of it.

It's like going to a wonderful museum,

because there's so much to look at.

-Longwood's a very unusual estate,

in so far as many people of his generation

who had substantial resources built themselves

very fancy gardens around them and what have you,

but they were walled estates.

They were for the enjoyment of the owners

and the owners' friends and family.

Pierre, on the other hand,

wanted Longwood to be available to everybody,

so, from the get-go, this was a place

for the enjoyment and education of the public.

It was his Wonderland, which he loved sharing with people.

-Pierre du Pont was really involved in the design

and choosing these pieces for his garden

and I can't even imagine how he would feel,

if he could walk round this workshop now

and just sort of see what we're doing to them

and see them close up again.

-We've never had a project this large come back to our office.

We have in total a little over 4,000 pieces of stone

and about 3,000 are in our shop.

Being able to manage the amount of stones that are here

is a lot of work.

We're using a tracking system,

which has a QR code attached to it

and so each crate had that QR code attached

and we were able to scan it when it left the job site.

We're tracking when everything starts,

the cleaning process and the repair process,

and then, when it gets packed up,

so we actually have a list of dates

that shows when everything was done to each piece of stone.

Limestone varies throughout the world and the country

and this stone, in particular, has a lot of shell inclusions

which make it deteriorate in unique ways.

-We get a whole range of different types of decay,

things that have shattered, things that have got

very cold and wet and frosty and just exploded.

-So, really, we have to evaluate the stones

on an individual basis.

-We're looking after

Pierre du Pont's real personal vision.

This is what he chose, down to the last detail.

We're unfolding his story again.

-The most rewarding part is being able to see the stone

when it's repaired and cleaned.

I don't think that anyone imagined

that they would get this clean

or that you'd be able to see this much detail on them,

which was really unrecognizable before.

-These are old friends,

so how do you take care of that old friend

and make sure that, when they come back

to the garden, in two years' time,

that they meet their old friend again and feel delighted?

-This is a masterwork.

By Pierre du Pont, who was quite a thoughtful character.

He had a vision.

He was the author. He was not just the client.

He arranged this. He thought about it.

He proportioned it. He did tests with water.

He didn't just engineer it. He skillfully laid out

a composition that is masterful in its effectiveness.

-I'm sure he would enjoy what everybody's doing right now:

the design, the problem-solving, the investment, the creativity,

which is, I think, probably more valuable to him.

It was doing the work that was fun work.

Seeing people enjoy it was the ultimate goal,

but, I don't think he did it so he could sit back,

two years, three years, five years later,

and say, "Wow, what a wonderful show."

I think he did it for the love of the work itself.

-He loved the fountains, I think,

because it was a combination of,

you know, terrific technology and terrific art and display.

I think he would be really thrilled

at this new iteration of the fountains.

-We're not changing anything about the original set piece.

We're adding embellishments.

We've come up with this new kind of nozzle,

based on something we saw in Germany,

which was a hoop of water, but these went

sort of diagonally and they made a twisted swirl

and the spray did not just convolute like this.

The composite angle created a kind of a waistline of water,

and so they had this kind of bouquet.

Pretty beautiful, actually,

and it lights beautifully, with all these crystal lines.

And then there's another thing we added to this, which is,

which is flame,

and the flame is cool because it's not just like a torch.

The fire comes up in tiny, little bubbles in the jet

and so the flame is on top of a jet of water.

It's like a primal dimension

that should always have been here, but wasn't.

So, now, we're gonna have fire.

Krrr!

It has a theatrical presence,

but it has a much deeper, magical content about it.

-Longwood's fountains have had

four main control systems over the years.

Now, in 2017,

we've started a new system, called Syncronorm.

It's from Germany and it's the latest development

for fountain control.

It has the typical controls

that you would turn pumps on and change the lights;

but it also have a visualizer, a second screen,

that allows you to see, in color, and almost in 3-D,

what the fountain show will look like in advance.

The end result that I'm trying to get is kind of like

an impressionist picture come to life.

I've also thought of it kind of as being

at the Russian Imperial Ballet

and almost like a giant Fabergé Easter egg made out of water.

There's just a lot of jewel tones, as well as misty tones.

The possibilities are endless.

-It doesn't matter how many mockups you've done.

It doesn't matter how much tests or calculation,

how much drawings or studies,

reflecting, thinking. It doesn't matter.

When the thing turns on, it's astounding!

The thousand things that are going on, little breezes

and people jumping up and down

and the gloriousness of it.

It is astounding!

And that's what I'm looking forward to.

And with hope I'm not ruining it by talking about it.

But it should make people cry, it will be so awesome.

It should make people cry.

Pierre works tirelessly

for much of his young, professional life.

He does find time to relax, attending countless dinners,

plays, and concerts with his cousin Alice Belin.

Their friendship matures and, in 1915,

Pierre and Alice marry.

His professional life reaches a new peak that same year

when he is named president of the DuPont Company.

Pierre leads the company through the most critical period

in DuPont's history,

as it transforms into a small family firm

into a large, modern corporation

and earning profits that reach undreamed-of levels.

-He envisioned the modern corporation.

To envision an organization

that invested in raw research and development?

To create Kevlar, nylon, Tyvek, and many other things.

The creativity of that,

the ability to envision and then create?

He did it again and again and again

throughout his lifetime.

His talents, I think, probably shouted at the world,

maybe in the way we look at Bill Gates today.

-During the same years that Pierre supervises

DuPont's huge wartime expansion, he is asked

to rescue General Motors from financial ruin.

-Then to be successful again, in relatively short order,

in rescuing General Motors.

As a businessperson, to do it once

is a lifetime's achievement.

To do it twice is unbelievable.

-Along with great wealth,

Pierre's impressive record of success in corporate America

invites great stress as well, including family fights,

lawsuits, and challenges from the federal government.

Through it all, he always has Longwood, and Alice.

Many of the inspirations

for the design of Longwood Gardens come

from the experiences that Alice and Pierre share.

-In 1910, he went to Italy

and he decided to invite Alice Belin,

who would become Mrs. du Pont,

and it was in Italy that he visited seven villas,

including the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, outside Rome.

The Villa d'Este is probably

the most famous fountain garden in the world.

It was created in the 16th century

by a cardinal who practically dug up the town

in order to bring the water through underground reservoirs

and aqueducts, through the town to his garden.

And it was there that he said,

"It would be nice to have something like this at home."

And then, three years later,

he was back in Italy, for a much larger trip.

They visited 22 different villas,

including the Villa Gamberaia, which would provide inspiration

for the Italian water garden here;

and the Villa Gori, which provided the inspiration

for an outdoor theater at Longwood.

And then, finally, in 1925,

he visited France with the Garden Club of America.

This was after World War I.

They had access to many private châteaus and gardens

that had not been opened publicly before.

These were the huge French gardens, like Versailles

and Vaux-le-Vicomte and Courances.

-Pierre du Pont came to visit gardens in Europe

because he was studying all the big gardens

before creating the fabulous Longwood Garden.

-He got to see there how they used water,

how they would build reservoirs on hills

that provided gravity-fed fountain displays.

-He visited. He probably talked quite a long time

with my great-grandfather about the technical problems,

but he certainly, most important thing,

he looked at the garden and sort of imagined

what would inspire him for the Longwood Garden.

The garden created by Le Nôtre

was a composition of green grass,

alleys, and water.

Here, there's a sort of harmony

between the quantity of grass and water.

The magic of water adds to the pleasure of a garden.

They did it for the pleasure of the eye, for the movement,

and the contrast between still waters and cascades

and waterworks, which filled up all the pools with movement.

The waterworks is a pleasure added to the visit.

It's a surprise.

"Oh, my God, look!

The water. And here again! And there!"

-Pierre was a very simple person and he was very shy,

but in his gardens, he was very theatrical

and that's exactly what he liked about Italian

and French gardens: they're very theatrical.

The spectator almost becomes an actor in a setting.

And nowhere, in any American garden,

is that more true than at Longwood.

All of his life, Pierre was involved in business,

so what's amazing is that he found the time

to pursue his design of Longwood, which he did himself.

He was Longwood's basic landscape architect.

He had used landscape architects when he first started out.

He did not care for their work, so, he bought a couple books,

started doing landscaping himself,

and Longwood certainly reflects his ability as his own designer,

which is kind of unusual, for these great estates.

There are two main periods in the construction

of the Main Fountain Garden.

First, the main conservatory was constructed,

from 1919 to '21.

It overlooked a large field and Mr. du Pont decided,

"Well, I need some landscaping out here,"

so he did some initial landscaping

with boxwood and large trees very close to the conservatory.

And then it sat like that for a number of years.

He went on to build the Italian water garden

and the open-air theater enlargement.

Finally, in about 1928, he decided to finish the area

in front of the main conservatory,

and this was to be the Main Fountain Garden.

So, in addition to the existing landscaping,

he added much more landscaping.

He would move in trees that were 70 feet tall.

He bought a boxwood that was 80 feet in circumferences

and cost $8,250, which was a lot of money back then.

And so he planted over 500 mature trees and shrubs

over basically a five-year period

and spent several hundred thousand dollars

on the landscaping.

He was 60 years old.

He couldn't wait for young plants to mature,

so he would bring in mature trees.

What he got was an instant garden.

Most of those trees are still there

and provide a much larger backdrop

than even when the garden first opened.

And what's important about the garden

is that you have this water,

but it's all surrounded by green,

the green of turf, boxwood, and mature trees,

so the green backdrop makes the water

actually show up even better than it would, otherwise.

This was sort of the culmination of his life's work

in garden design.

Pierre was very involved in all the aspects

in the construction of the Main Fountain Garden,

particularly in the stonework.

When it came to the carved stone,

he worked with the supplier in Italy, Olivotti,

and their Chief Designer Piero Morseletto.

They would send all the designs over.

He would accept some; he would reject some.

He spent a great deal of time worrying about

the ornamentation of the garden.

-Longwood's always had a tradition

of having something that's unpredictable.

You turn the corner and you find something you don't expect.

-Grottos are otherworldly.

They're a place of retreat.

They hark back to the Homeric cave.

They were used by emperors and also by hermits,

so they crossed the cultural and social divides historically.

They're spaces of magic.

Nymphs might live here.

It might be religious.

-There are grottos in Europe and other parts of the world

where it's almost as if the devil is coming out

from the center of the Earth

and so they're kind of spooky and eery,

but also beautiful and inspirational.

And so we've created a grotto

that is unlike others in the world,

in the fact that it's new in the 21st century.

We had this wonderful opportunity

because we were going to blow out and excavate

the entire original pump house,

so we had this open canvas and it was wonderful

because we could do it behind the original wall.

-We wanted to design the grotto whereas it was not very evident,

but, as you got close to it, you saw these two,

small openings in the pump-house wall,

and if you happened to wander into those,

you turn the corner...

-And you will descend into a very different world

and you'll hear the water movements

as you come down into the grotto

and then the chamber will open up before you.

There'll be some very concealed light sources

which will feel very intimate and magical.

We will have this very large, circular water curtain

which falls from the heavens

and there's a sense that the water that's cascaded

down the garden toward the grotto

is then closed in its loop,

it's back to its aquifer and it's the sort of termination

and the source for water in the garden.

We really studied those historic grottos

that Pierre du Pont would've seen: Villa d'Este;

Vaux-le-Vicomte in France, in particular.

In studying those, we kind of came up with the shapes

and then the next layer for us was

to make this specific to its location at Longwood.

Grottos are about rock. They're a heavenly cave,

so we did a lot of exploration about the geology

around Longwood and that really informed

how we treated the interior with this local stone,

this mica stone which has this sparkle to it.

-A piece of stone is not just

a piece of stone sitting on the ground.

This stone has life in it.

I can feel it.

-It's a building material that's been around

since the beginning of time.

The very oldest of buildings were stone

and I think that's probably the charm of it.

-Most of the stone comes from here, from D'Amico Quarry.

-They were trying to look for a grade of stone

that would give 'em a really old feel, and the mica does that.

This has got a lot of fleck and sparkly stuff in it.

-It's not easy to find the texture,

what makes it look pretty old.

That's what makes the difference on this type of stone.

-Well, in the afternoon, like now,

there'll be quite a bit of light in here,

but early morning, maybe later in the evening,

it'll be a really kind of a darker, neat feel,

and when they have night events, when they open this up,

the lighting will be spectacular.

-People who've been coming to Longwood for decades

will think, hopefully, that,

"Gosh, was that grotto always there?",

when it's going to be an entirely new

and different experience.

-We've taken all these pieces of stone apart.

Now, we have to fit them back together

over new concrete structures that sit below them

and making sure that coordinates with all the lighting

and the tiles and all the other new things in the planting.

It's a really exciting, but also challenging, phase.

We're trying to put this jigsaw puzzle back together.

-The night belongs to something magical.

You need something at night that you don't have during the day.

It's in our bodies. It's physiological.

And the night is there to remind us

that we belong to larger universe.

I founded L'Observatoire International,

which is a lighting-design company.

Like I say very often to my team,

we are storyteller.

It's like writing a movie

and the light is the great actor.

It's how we orchestrate different type of light

to create like an emotion, a surprise.

It should talk to your heart, talk to your sense.

We're lighting, in a very subtle way,

all the architecture and the basins.

Tried to hide the lighting as much as I could,

having light fixture under the bench for the path,

lights subtly the trees

so they don't become like too artificial.

At night, all those

little detail of architecture can be magnified.

During the day, the light come down.

At night, the light come up.

The visitors don't always see this data,

which is great, because it gives them

the opportunity of coming during the day

and coming back at night to see something else.

-It's been a construction site for a long time.

Lighting is kind of the final little piece of the project.

It puts it all together for the evening experience.

It's a beautiful time to kind of see the balance, you know.

You start to see the highlights that the lighting can bring out.

We call it the blue moment, which is a time period

after the sun has gone down and the sky starts to transform

and go through these beautiful shades of indigo

and it's essentially like a crossfade

between daylight and electric light.

People are really, really encouraged in this new design

to really enter the garden.

Lighting, in our view, in the evening,

is part of that invitation to explore.

Not just see something from a distance,

but really get up close and personal and touch the water

and discover some of these really special places

that are little hidden gems.

- I like to keep the spirit of the mystery of the night.

This place has a life during the day

and should have a very different life at night,

having like mysterious moments

where not everything is evenly lit,

to give sense of a little bit more depth.

It's a little bit emotional for the first time

when you see your project

when it's getting built and realize like this.

You see what it looks like, you know,

from the drawing, from the imagination,

from everything you've been dreaming about,

and, now, it's alive. It's here.

I'm from France and I remember, in my early age,

my parents taking me to Versailles.

In the summertime, you had a beautiful water show.

It was fabulous.

And the memory I have brings some of the sensation here.

You always remember the emotion and what you felt.

It never leaves your mind.

It doesn't leave your body.

You always feel it.

-I couldn't sleep very much.

I've been waiting for this day for years

and, suddenly, it's here.

We had one chance to get this right.

Knowing that this was going to live beyond any of us

that are involved in it right now,

striving for the highest quality was without question.

What's so remarkable about this project

is that it looks very simple.

I compare it to almost like a ballet.

It's so beautiful and it just flows.

What people don't see is the hours and hours

of daunting practice, tears, and blood

that have been shed on every little movement

that that ballet dancer has made.

Anything that you see in this project,

hundreds of thousands of decisions and discussions

have been made behind every detail

and it's those details that make Longwood special.

It's one of the reasons this project has taken six years.

Everything that we had hoped and dreamed, it is really happening!

It's like nothing you have ever, ever seen before, in your life.

-Wow!

-I'm just blown away by the whole thing.

- It was absolutely spectacular. - Loved it.

It was vibrant, beautiful. - Excellent.

-I was expecting like a 10, and it ended up being like a 20.

-When we first came here,

I noticed how lively the fountains were.

They kinda greeted us when we walked by

and shooting up and splashing us with water.

-If you just close your eyes and listen to the water,

it feels like a different time and a different place.

-Sort of like Ancient Greece or something.

-I was thinking of being

a little kid, running through the sprinkler.

There was a visceral happiness.

-It makes you feel alive.

-We look around and just stare in awe.

-All the colors in the rainbow.

-The colors were so vivid.

-I didn't expect to see fire on the water.

The flame jets.

Oh, my gosh.

-I have no idea how that's possible, but, it was awesome.

-It was really poetic, at times, and then very powerful.

-I loved the swaying. It looked like it was like

backup dancers on a stage. - Yeah.

-They make me wanna ♪ sing and dance ♪

-I've been coming here since I was a little, little kid,

and it's a brand-new memory.

-Brought everybody together this year,

an experience that everybody enjoyed.

-The thing that I'm most proud of

is the fact that we were bold enough to do it.

-I never want somebody to say, "Oh, I've been to Longwood.

I don't have to go back,"

and so we have to keep changing.

We have to keep thinking about what the visitor

of 20 years from now is going to appreciate,

because heavens knows we're not gonna

replace those fountains again for another 100 years,

or maybe 150 years, the way they've been built.

-It was, without a doubt,

our founder, Pierre du Pont's, vision.

He wanted it to be beautiful. He wanted it to have

extraordinary plants and displays grown here

and he wanted people to have fun

and he wanted people to be inspired.

-If Uncle Pierre were alive today...

...he would look at those people and hear those people laughing

and enjoying themselves and think to himself,

"Yes! We've done it.

And we've done it right."