Longwood Gardens

Growing up in Broomall, Jesse Grantham remembers two unscripted moments that played an outsized role in shaping the career he would choose and the person he would become. Moment No. 1: He's 8, in the car with his parents, on the way to pick up the babysitter. Once there, he looks up and sees a purple martin rockin' and a-rollin' through an old sycamore tree. He knows about these aerial acrobats from his bird books, but up close, as they dive-bomb for flying insects, they're wildly entertaining.

It was an inspired match: Leah Stein, Philadelphia's premier maker of outdoor dance, and Longwood Gardens, one of the world's outstanding public gardens. With Longwood's exquisitely tuned spaces, it is as if Stein had been handed a Strad to play on. Sunday afternoon, Stein orchestrated a performance studded with the kind of enchanting, surreal moments she produces so abundantly in her outdoor work. Her 13 dancers (she and her dance company, plus local children - almost all from farmworker families - and adults)

Longwood Gardens will combine centuries-old Japanese arts with good ol' Longwood creativity and 20,000 mums. It's Longwood Gardens' annual Chrysanthemum Festival. This year's theme is "Celebrating Japan. " Two visiting artists and three craftsmen from Hirakata Park, in Osaka, will demonstrate the art of making life-size dolls out of living mums. Sounds painful, but it's quite beautiful. Before they left Japan, the artists made body frames of bamboo and straw matting and faces of a hand-painted composite.

The month will also be filled with special programs, including a display of books by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, plus theater presentations, children's craft workshops, lectures, demonstrations and live music. The festival will run through Dec. 1. All events are included in the gardens' regular admission fee. A program brochure is available by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to Chrysanthemum Festival, Longwood Gardens, P.O. Box 501, Kennett Square 19348-0501.

The word at Longwood Gardens is mum - chrysanthemum. Tomorrow through Nov. 23, no less than 15,000 chrysanthemums will go on display at Longwood's sixth annual Chrysanthemum Festival, one of the major flower shows of the year as well as a sensory treat for fans of the showy fall flower. "It is," says Colvin Randall, Longwood's publicity director, "our most spectacular event of the year. " Imagine strolling through the gardens, beholding four acres of 40 varieties of yellow, pink, white and bronze mums, all grown and fashioned in mounds, globes, columns and cascades.

The focus will be on fun for kids as dinosaurs, Winnie the Pooh, comedy and song come to Longwood Gardens next month. Kids will be king for the day every Saturday in February as Longwood Gardens holds its 3d Annual Four Fabulous February Fun Days, geared for kids ages 3 to 12. The first Fun Day is scheduled for Feb. 4 with Dinosaur Rock, a sing-along rock opera featuring walking, talking and dancing dinosaur puppets. The life-size puppets premiered at the Smithsonian Institution's Discovery Theater and were designed by Emmy-winning puppeteer Ingrid Crepeau.

Longwood Gardens is fertilizing more than its soil these days; it's helping bring the area a large increase in tourism. By March, renovations on the Longwood Meeting House, owned by the Gardens, will have changed the historic Quaker site into a tourist center, which will be leased to the Chester County Tourist Bureau. Nearby, East Marlborough officials are talking to a hotel owner who wants to expand and to a New Jersey developer who wants to build a hotel. The Chester County Tourist Bureau talks to 2,500 to 3,000 people a year at an information desk it operates in the lobby of the Gardens site, according to Bea Harrison, director of group services and marketing at the bureau.

FESTIVAL OF FOUNTAINS. May 29-Sept. 4, Longwood Gardens, Route 1, 3 miles northeast of Kennett Square. Most performances free with Garden admission. Info: 610-388-1000. In an age when different musical styles are unyieldingly pigeonholed by marketers, merchants and yes, the press, one area presenter brings all sorts of music to an eager and oft-returning public. And despite the best efforts of broadcasters and the music industry to consign all music either to rigidly defined markets or to oblivion, one regional venue regularly introduces people to stuff they have never heard before.

Longwood Gardens has some winter programs planned for the coming weeks, beginning with a cooking demonstration for a Valentine's dinner for two. Longwood's chefs will share cooking tips for a romantic meal and give tastings at 1:30 p.m. today in the restaurant. More demonstrations will be held next Thursday, Feb. 21 and 28, and March 7 and 14. At 2:30 p.m. Sunday, the David Leonhardt Jazz Group and the Shelley Oliver Tap Dancers will perform jazz standards and Leonhardt's original songs in the Rose Pavilion.

Growing up in Broomall, Jesse Grantham remembers two unscripted moments that played an outsized role in shaping the career he would choose and the person he would become. Moment No. 1: He's 8, in the car with his parents, on the way to pick up the babysitter. Once there, he looks up and sees a purple martin rockin' and a-rollin' through an old sycamore tree. He knows about these aerial acrobats from his bird books, but up close, as they dive-bomb for flying insects, they're wildly entertaining.

Curious about what some of the public gardens and arboretums in the Philadelphia region are planning for 2012? Here's a preview: Awbury Arboretum in Germantown has a new community apiary - three hives outside and a demonstration hive inside the Francis Cope House. A 10-session beekeeping course is under way and a 4-H beekeeping club is planned, as are honey sales. Beekeeper Anaiis Salles suggested the apiary because "Awbury has underutilized green space, plenty of room for hives, it's easy to get to, and has a really nontoxic environment.

WANT TO SPICE UP this dull and dismal January? Go to Spain, at least in spirit, by traveling to Chester County's Longwood Gardens for one of Spain's most dynamic and beloved flamenco groups, Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenco. Flamenco, invented in southern Spain's Andalusia region, is part dance, part musical performance. Noche Flamenco performs traditional flamenco, in which guitar and flamenco dance accompanies a singer. Flamenco music is meant to express very strong, typically tragic emotions, though this group also performs happier arrangements such as a jaleo, meant to express the joy of life.

Mount Cuba Center in Greenville, Del., the horticultural nonprofit dedicated to native plants in the Appalachian Piedmont, is the first among the public gardens in the Philadelphia region, and possibly beyond, to start a distance-learning program. Two wholly online, on-demand classes - six hours on native ferns for $40 and three hours on creating a hummingbird garden for $25 - debuted in November. In January and February, two more classes - moss gardening and meadow plants - will be available via computer or mobile device at www.mtcubacenter.org . This may not sound earthshaking, given that millions of college students and others have been learning online for years.

Paige Victor "Vic" Sencindiver, 84, a thoracic and general surgeon in Philadelphia and former mayor of Beach Haven, N.J., died of complications of strokes Tuesday, Dec. 27, at Kendal-Crosslands, a retirement community in Kennett Square. A native of Martinsburg, W.Va., Dr. Sencindiver earned a bachelor's degree in 1948 from West Virginia University. He earned a medical degree from Thomas Jefferson University and then interned and was a surgical resident at Jefferson University Hospital.

Maggie Knapp is about as lean and fit as a 50-year-old woman can be. And no wonder: She's spent literally half her life working outdoors at Jenkins Arboretum in Devon, where she's the head gardener. "Working outdoors" sounds as if she's leisurely raking leaves. Knapp does that, yes, but she also splits wood, chases trespassing deer, mans the snow plow and wields a steady chain saw. She prunes, plants, propagates, and weeds - and hauls a yeoman's load of mulch. You can't miss her. Spend even an hour at this 46-acre public garden, and she'll whiz by you in a golf cart, troubleshooting and problem-solving along 1.2 miles of paved walkways.

AS JIM SUTTON guided a visitor through Longwood Garden's Christmas exhibit, he paused at a display of 12 poinsettias in a back corner of the main conservatory. "This is a voluptuous one," he said, stopping to finger the leaves of a plant called "Vintage Red. " Sutton, Longwood's display designer, oversees events such as January's Orchid Extravaganza and the Chrysanthemum Festival in fall. But his biggest job by far is A Longwood Christmas, the annual explosion of lights, trees and poinsettias that jams traffic in sleepy Kennett Square every December.

It reads like the roster at a big-city arts center: concerts by singer Suzanne Vega, the King's Singers, the Danilo Pérez Trio, pianist Simone Dinnerstein, organ recitals, and dance-company spectacles. The setting, however, is anything but city. Thirty miles west of Philadelphia, rolling meadows and formal conservatories have become home to one of the region's busiest arts presenters. Longwood Gardens is importing more than 60 free and ticketed classical, pop, and jazz events this season - more than twice the number of last season.

Red Baraat In the world of Red Baraat, the nine-piece Brooklyn band, "D & B" stands not for "Drum 'n' Bass" or "Dave & Buster's," but "Dhol and Brass. " "Dhol" would be the double-sided barrel drum beaten by leader Sunny Jain; "brass" refers to the full horn section that provides the New Orleans-style marching band element in the wholly unique, boisterous blend of Indian bhangra beats and horn-happy dance-party funk. "Chaal Baby," the title track to the band's 2010 debut album, can be heard in the promo ads for the new season of the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Roebuck "Pops" Staples formed the Staple Singers 60 years ago, drafting his young daughter Mavis to share lead vocals with him on gospel tunes done in a swampy, Southern blues style. Mavis' voice, a startling contralto then, has gotten only deeper and richer with age, and at 72, she's in the midst of a late-career renaissance. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member won a Grammy for last year's Jeff Tweedy-produced You Are Not Alone , the album that provided the core of a fantastic performance at Kennett Square's Longwood Gardens Wednesday night.