Mammoth mum (1,000 blooms!)

I took these last night at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA.

The 1,000-bloom mum is the star of the 2023 Longwood Gardens Chrysanthemum Festival

The Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum (known in Japan as Ozukuri) refers to a technique, originating in China and expanding to Japan several hundred years ago, for growing an extremely large Chrysanthemum, with a goal of producing the maximum number of flowers possible on a single plant. If that doesn’t sound difficult enough, the technique also requires that there is only a single bloom on the end of each individual branch; none of the flowers on the sides of the branch is used.  And to further complicate matters, each flower must be perfectly placed in concentric horizontal rows on a dome-shaped frame! The largest specimen recorded in Japan had over 2,200 flowers—only a few growers in the entire world have been able to produce a plant that large.