Getting to Cheekwood Harvest
As the majority of Nashvillians were enjoying the long summer days leading up to the Fourth of July, Peter Grimaldi had mums on his mind. The Vice President of Gardens & Facilities at Cheekwood was already hard at work making sure the flowers central to the botanical garden’s fall program would be ready by Labor Day—even if autumn temperatures wouldn’t comply. “Those mums are rolling out in mid-to-late August, regardless of whether or not it's in the mid-90s,” Grimaldi said.
Though Cheekwood has been open to the public since 1960, the former home of Maxwell House coffee tycoons Leslie and Mabel Cheek has recently transformed from a historic site with one of the best botanical gardens in the country to a favorite local hotspot and tourist destination. With over 400,000 visitors each year and 20,000 member households, the fifty-acre property nestled in Belle Meade has grown along with Nashville, amassing a calendar of seasonal events so popular that visitors now have to reserve a ticket online before visiting.
Much of Cheekwood’s growth coincided with its increased focus on the mansion’s art museum, which has hosted exhibits featuring an array of high-profile artists, from Andy Warhol to cartoonist Charles Addams. However, the estate’s introduction of its Holiday LIGHTS display in 2015 quickly became its signature program, offering visitors a chance to enjoy the grounds, which staff have decked out in over one million bulbs. As Cheekwood becomes more of a seasonal event staple, Grimaldi and his team have worked to make sure that Harvest is as much of a draw.
Running from September 14 to October 27th, Cheekwood Harvest boasts over 75,000 pumpkins and 4,000 mums throughout the estate. In addition to experiencing some of the best views of fall foliage in Nashville, visitors can enjoy three houses made entirely of pumpkins as well as the event’s showpiece: a nine-foot “P’mumkin” topiary made of orange mums arranged in the shape of a giant pumpkin. Throughout the early fall, visitors can also walk the scarecrow trail and enjoy an Oktoberfest-inspired beer garden.
For Grimaldi, Harvest presents its own challenges thanks to the unpredictability of temperatures that could just as easily make the days feel like late July as a perfect fall afternoon. “The prevailing temperatures are going to have a direct impact on how quickly the mums bloom,” Grimaldi said. “The management response for us really amounts to how much water they require. They'll move through their bloom cycle faster if it's hotter and brighter.”
During volatile autumns such as the one we are currently experiencing, Cheekwood’s gardens and facilities team must be prepared to swap out fading plants and pumpkins to ensure the exhibit endures throughout the season. Such uncertainty can cause enough maintenance issues on their own, but Cheekwood’s color garden remaining in full bloom through most of the fall and the enormous undertaking of readying LIGHTS shortly before Halloween makes the season even more demanding.
Fortunately, Cheekwood’s collaborations with local farmers help keep the whole affair running smoothly while providing numerous partnerships for the property to reach far beyond the boundaries of the Metro Area. “We’ve worked with a family farm [in Northern Tennessee] across fall for the past five or five or six years,” Grimaldi said. “We just looked at those folks a couple years ago and said, ‘Hey, we will buy as many pumpkins as you can grow.’ And we've surpassed even the capacity of that fundamental relationship.”
Although Harvest has achieved essential status on many a fall calendar, Grimaldi hopes the event will also showcase the rest of Cheekwood’s year-round programming to its throngs of visitors over the next few weeks. “It’s a great season to see Cheekwood, but it's just another opportunity to dig a little bit deeper once you get here–for example, the permanent living collections,” Grimaldi said. “You come for the pumpkins or the holiday lights and you turn the page of your visitor guide and see what else Cheekwood has to offer.”
Nashville, like every city in America, has no shortage of fall displays and pumpkin patches, but Grimaldi credits Cheekwood’s unique combination of estate grounds and permanent gardens with its always-expanding role in Music City’s cultural landscape. “The horticulture and color garden would be impressive if you rolled them out on the floor of an airport or convention center,” Grimaldi said. “But once you take that display and cast it onto this historic landscape, and monumental, world-class sculpture in the middle of it, then you're really talking. You've got this synergy created by the multiple components of the mission sharing the same space. It can result in pretty unique aesthetic experiences.”
Tickets to Harvest are available on Cheekwood’s website.