$60 Million Bouquet

Visiting Pierre S. du Pont's fabulous Longwood Gardens near Kennett Square, Pa. in 1926. President Calvin Coolidge passed in Yankee silence among exotic ixora, agapanthus, orchids, vanilla vines and breadfruit, finally spotted a familiar sight. Said the President: "Bananas."

Chemical Manufacturer du Pont, creator of Longwood, died last spring at 84. Last week his will disclosed that he had left almost his whole fortune to a benevolent foundation which will keep the famed gardens growing. Total bequest: some $60 million (including 3,000 shares of Christiana Securities Co. at $11.000 a share). Pierre du Pont's gift makes Longwood, open to the public since 1921, one of the world's most richly endowed pieces of real estate.

Acres under Glass. William Penn granted the tract (in 1702) to one George Peirce, whose descendants imported bricks from England to build a small manor, later sheltered runaway slaves. In 1906, when Du Pont bought the 950-acre estate, "Peirce's Park" was already a pretty arboretum. Du Pont money transformed it into an American Versailles. Du Pont spent $500,000 for fountains, built $2 million worth of greenhouses to put three acres under glass. Admiring the water gardens of Italy's Villa Gamberaia near Florence, he copied them at Longwood--adding lakes and canals.

Mrs. du Pont was fond of organ music but was also hard of hearing, so he built one of the most formidable organs on earth, incorporating a percussion division, harps, celesta, drums, xylophone, tympani, tambourine, tom-tom. Chinese gong and 11,000 pipes, ranging from pencil size (8,000 vibrations a second) to one 34 feet tall and weighing a long ton (13 vibrations a second). Mrs. du Pont could hear it all.

Gilt-Edged Lilies. For amateur theatricals (often by Philadelphia's socialite Savoyards), Du Pont built an outdoor theater with 62-ft. stage, arboreal wings and a curtain that rises instead of falling after each act (a screen of water gushing upward from hidden fountains). Elsewhere, batteries of. fountains play in intricate patterns, illuminated at night by masses of colored floodlights--red, blue, green, flame, flesh pink and moonlight tones. The fountains can spray water at the rate of 840,000 gallons hourly; a single fountain, Old Faithful, shoots jets 140 feet high or fanning out 100 feet wide.

Some four million visitors (300,000 last year) have toured Longwood, admired the sunken gardens, marbled conservatory, the great crystal chandeliers and thousands of blooming plants (flowers are replaced before wilting). Hereafter, the pleasure which visitors take in the agapanthus and the vanilla vines will grow or shrink (depending on individual personality and politics) with the thought of that $60 million. Longwood's taxexempt, gilt-edged lilies will toil not, nor spin; they may invite some musing future Coolidge to murmur: "Some shareholders."

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