How to Make Gingerbread Ornaments at Home

We are thrilled to welcome Liz Marden & her daughter Kat Marden from Liz Marden Bakery & Cafe in Kennett Square, PA as guest bloggers for Behind-the-Plants! Liz and Kat created more than 8,000 gingerbread cookies, as well as two stunning gingerbread models of the Conservatory and the Peirce-du Pont House that are used throughout this year’s Christmas display. They share their “construction grade” gingerbread recipe below!

Construction Gingerbread Recipe

All Purpose Flour          6 ¾ cups
Ground Cinnamon        1 Tablespoon
Ground Ginger              1 ½ teaspoons
Salt                                ½ teaspoon
Light Corn Syrup           1 ½ cups
Light Brown Sugar        1 ¼ cups firmly packed
Butter                               1 cup

Yield: 1 Gingerbread House or a lot of ornaments!

Gather your ingredients

Step 1: Preheat oven to 350 F. Get all of your ingredients and measuring cups together. Choose cookie cutters!

Step 2: Sift flour, cinnamon, ginger, and salt and place in large bowl.

Combine corn syrup, brown sugar and butter over heat

Step 3: In a saucepan over medium heat, combine light corn syrup, brown sugar, and butter, stir. Do not boil – heat only until butter is melted.

Stir until well mixed and dough is formed

Step 4: Pour butter mixture into the bowl with the flour mixture and stir until well mixed and dough is formed.

Step 5: Roll out gingerbread dough with a rolling pin on a piece of parchment paper* while the dough is still warm – if dough cools put in microwave for 45 to 60 seconds to reheat. This makes rolling much easier.
*Parchment paper is available at quality kitchen supply stores.

Cut out the cookies, and peel away excess gingerbread

Step 6: Using your chosen cookie cutter, cut out the cookies, peel away excess gingerbread from parchment paper and save to re-roll. If you are going to hang the ornaments, poke the holes now with a straw, taking away the excess gingerbread.

Create holes with a straw so that ornaments can be hung later

Step 7: Bake until golden brown and firm to the touch approximately 15 to 25 minutes.

To Decorate: We like to make royal icing the easy way – with meringue powder. Mix it up, make it any color then pipe away! We used a pastry bag with a #4 round tip. You can also use a plastic bag that zips with the corner snipped off.

Use royal icing to decorate

Royal Icing Recipe

Meringue Powder         3 Tablespoons
Confectioners’ Sugar    1 lb.
Water, lukewarm          7 Tablespoons

Combine meringue powder and confectioners’ sugar in bowl. Whip with electric hand mixer on low speed, adding water one tablespoon at a time. Then continue to whip on medium speed for 8 minutes until icing becomes stiff, but not too stiff to pipe. Keep royal icing bowl covered at all times with a damp towel to keep it from drying out!

Voila! Easy, homemade ornaments beautiful enough to decorate any tree!

Gingerbread men fashioned into a garland - at Longwood Gardens

Fast Forward to Christmas

If you visit Longwood Gardens on a regular basis you know that we like to create dynamic and inspiring displays for each season. Our most-visited seasons is, by far, the Christmas display (which is on view now through January 8, 2012).

Our Christmas transformation begins when the Gardens close at 5 pm on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and ends at 9 am on Thanksgiving morning, when we open the display to the public.

We hope you enjoy our time-lapse video that shows part of this holiday decorating marathon! We move from one great display to the next in a blink of an eye. Even Santa would have a tough time keeping up with us!

One Singular Sensation

Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'Paint Box'

The tall, single-stemmed chrysanthemums you see in the Conservatory here at Longwood Gardens are quite different than the mounded shrubs loaded with small flowers that you find at your local garden center.  These are a specialty florist type and the product of hundreds of years of breeding, so they are able to reach stately heights and flower sizes. Additionally, they are not winter hardy for us in Southeast Pennsylvania.

Vegetative cuttings are taken in early summer and placed under mist to start new plants.

The first thing to know about chrysanthemums is that they flower when day length is shorter than 12 hours. This happens naturally as we get closer to autumn. So the earlier we start our plants in the greenhouse, the more time the mum has to put on green vegetative growth before setting flower. The tallest of the single-stem mums at Longwood are ordered in as rooted cuttings, or started from cuttings of our stock plants in early June. The shorter we want the single stems to finish, the later in the summer they are started.  Our shortest single stems are started in early August.

The tall yellow mum on the left was started June 1st while the shorter orange one on the right was started July 15th.

As the mum grows, a side branch will grow at every point where a new leaf forms. All summer we remove the side branches, a process that happens at least every two weeks to ensure that they don’t rob energy from the main stem. With almost 3,000 single-stems to care for, by the time we get through all of them it’s time to start at the beginning again!

Finally in late September a cluster of flowers starts to form at the top of the stem.  At this point, side buds are removed so that all of the plant’s energy goes into forming one large flower instead of several smaller ones. The size of this final flower depends on the type of chrysanthemum. We have some incurve varieties that can produce huge flowers the size of your head!

Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'Houston' (Irregular Incurve)

Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'Hagoromo' (Irregular Incurve)

Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'Statesman', a pompon mum grown as a single stem.

In contrast, even with removing all of the side blooms, pompon chrysanthemums produce one tiny flower at the top of the stem.  With these it is best to let the plant do its own thing and end up with hundreds of smaller beautiful flowers.  This is also true with most garden mums.

'Statesman' again, this time allowed to grow as a multi-stemmed plant.

By the end of October, our greenhouses are full of bright oranges, yellows, purples, and reds. The single-stems are ready for our Conservatory staff to plant in perfect rows for all to enjoy!

Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'Golden Splendour'

Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'Hagoromo'

Chrysanthemum x morifolium 'St. Tropez'

No Ordinary Mum

Come see our Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum now in the East Conservatory!

Do you hear the word chrysanthemum and picture those simple household flowers from the local garden shop? At Longwood Gardens, we take the ordinary mum and make it extraordinary, turning it into a work of art—the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum!

We started our Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum from vegetative cuttings of Chrysanthemum x morifolium ‘Sosono no Tsuki’ in May 2010. In order to grow this year’s mum, we had to overcome the challenges of heat, rain (Hurricane Irene!), stink bugs, and the 12’ 7” wide door of the East Conservatory (which was just barely wide enough to bring the mum through).

Each year, we grow two plants to help ensure we can reach our goal of more than 1,000 blooms on a single plant. Each month, both plants are repotted, pinched, tied, and framed as needed. In the end, we will use only one of them for display in the Conservatory. Here is a slideshow that documents the mum’s growth over the past year. Please enjoy!

MONTHLY PROGRESS:

May 2010: Several cuttings are taken from stock plants grown at Longwood. After two weeks they are brought into the greenhouse to harden off and are then transplanted into 4” pots.

June 2010: The plants are transplanted into larger pots and have their stems scratched (scarification) with a knife to apply rooting hormone. This creates a larger root system to support the enormous top growth.

Stem scarification

To prevent flowering, the plants are placed in a greenhouse lit at night. During  summer, the plants continue to grow and are pinched at around 2” tall to encourage 14-18 shoots by first pinching. We continue to pinch every 6-8 leaves depending on stem length.

December 2010: Two plants are selected and placed into final growing containers that are custom made by Longwood’s carpenters. The containers are made with dividers so that the volume of soil can increase as the plant grows. The main metal support structure is also put into place and will extend as the plant grows. Stems are bent down to begin forming the structure of the final plant.

February 2011: The first set of framing is applied to the main support structure. Each frame layer is constructed on site and is made of fiberglass rods wrapped in black tape. The tape makes the rods easy to handle and also adds a bit of friction to help us twist the ties used to hold the stems to the rods. The fiberglass rods are joined by custom-made connectors and tied together with zip ties.

March 2011: Another set of framing is added, increasing the overall width by about 5-8″. To increase the number of branches, we pinch and then tie each stem to the fiberglass frame with a twist tie.

After we place the mums into their final growing container, we continually coax them to grow bigger—with pinching (to encourage branching) as well as proper watering and fertilization techniques (to encourage healthy growth). The plants are monitored for any signs of disease or insects that are treated as needed.

Each month, depending on growth, the fiberglass framework is extended to help encourage growth and to continue to support the stems as we reach our final size.

July 5, 2011 – Before framing

July 7, 2011 – First layer tied

July 13, 2011 – Over half way

July 15, 2011 – All stems tied

September 8, 2011 – Stems are evenly spaced and tips lined up

September 2011:As the buds begin to form, we begin to disbud the mums. This process involves taking all of the smaller side buds off and only allowing the main center bud to continue to grow, resulting in one beautiful  4-5” flower on each stem.

Disbudding - removing the smaller side buds

Placing each flower into a Rindai support

October 2011: Less than one month before the beginning of Chrysanthemum Festival, we select our display plant and begin final flower placement. The frame is custom made each year based on the plant’s size.

Longwood’s Chrysanthemum specialist and her crew of interns, international students, seasonal, and part-time staff members begin by arranging the flowers on the top first and working their way down, making sure each row is placed perfectly in concentric rings and that each flower is lovingly placed into a Rindai support to properly position it.

View of the one stem, main support frame, and perforated pvc pipes (in place to aerate the soil)

The process of placing the flowers takes about 10 days, at the end of which we finally know the answer to everyone’s question, “HOW MANY BLOOMS THIS YEAR??” After achieving 991 blooms on the 2010 Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum, our goal was to beat that number. And we did!!!  This year’s total is 1,167 flowers!!!

As you can see, a lot of time and effort goes into producing the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum. It’s on display now in the East Conservatory. Make sure to kneel down to see the one stem coming from the soil!

The Chrysanthemum Festival, October 29–November 20, showcases thousands of amazing chrysanthemums throughout the Conservatory, including Cascade style, topiaries, single stem mums and the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum.

Clivia in the Classroom

Yellow clivia in the East Conservatory. These plants were pollinated to produce beautiful yellow berries. The berries yielded seeds for the participating students.

This year, Longwood kicked off a program to engage a new generation of clivia enthusiasts! As part of our “Clivia in the Classroom” program, we gave blooming-sized clivia plants and seeds to eight biology and horticulture teachers in area schools. During this school year, the teachers are using the plant materials as a class project where students can get hands-on experience growing and caring for clivias.

The students are being taught how to provide the proper cultural conditions to force their plants into bloom—just in time for the for the North American Clivia Society show, March 17 and 18, 2012, at Longwood Gardens.

The show will feature a special judging division for the students to enter their plants. We can’t wait to see how the students fare with their plants this March!

Each teacher was allowed to select their own plant to enter into the show.

In addition to taking care of the plants in the classroom, students from the participating classes received clivia seeds to take home and nurture year-round. All of the plants being used in the program are yellow-flowered and resulted from Longwood’s 36-year-old clivia breeding program.