Exhibition chrysanthemums with blooms shaped like delicate globes and dramatic spiders are taking over Duke Gardens in Durham this weekend, part of a free festival that traces back to a five-gallon bucket of flowers brought in more than a decade ago. The Festival of Fabulous Mums runs at Sarah P. Duke Gardens, 420 Anderson St., with the display open noon to 4 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 6, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
The festival's origin story goes back to grower Joan Matthews, who met Paul Jones, curator of the Culberson Asiatic Arboretum, in 2013, according to the Raleigh News & Observer. Jones asked Matthews to help bring chrysanthemums to the gardens, and she arrived with a five-gallon bucket of the flowers, the paper reports. The partnership led Duke Gardens and Matthews to organize the inaugural Festival of Fabulous Mums in 2014, and the event has continued for more than a decade since.
This year's display puts flowers both indoors and outdoors. According to the event page from Duke Gardens, exhibition mums will create a dazzling floral display outdoors at the Ruth Mary Meyer Japanese Garden in the Culberson Asiatic Arboretum and inside the Doris Duke Center. A separate Duke Gardens page describes the festival as entirely outdoors, saying the festival is entirely outdoors and free to attend, though university parking fees apply — a discrepancy between the garden's own pages that isn't resolved in the available materials.
Free and Open to All Ages, With a Few Caveats
The exhibit is free and drop-in, open to all ages, though children must be accompanied by an adult, the event page notes. Families are encouraged to attend, and members of the Central Carolina Chrysanthemums Society will be on hand to share their expertise and introduce visitors to 13 classes of chrysanthemums, highlighting those classes and answering questions throughout the weekend.
Visitors headed outdoors should expect a combination of paved and unpaved paths with some uneven surfaces and moderate inclines, per the garden's own description. Restrooms equipped with accessible features are located inside the Doris Duke Center, according to Duke Gardens' accessibility information.
Parking and Getting There
Parking fees apply at Duke Gardens, and the only way to pay is through Duke's Blue Spot parking website on personal phone devices, the gardens' parking page states. On Saturday and Sunday, visitors may park in Duke University's Campus Drive lot, and free Duke Campus buses along with GoDurham and GoTriangle buses all have stops at or near the gardens' entrances.
A Fading Art Form Behind the Blooms
What makes the festival more than a pretty backdrop is the craft itself. Exhibit mums differ from commercial mums in that growers use specialized techniques to produce larger flowers and intricate petal arrangements, with blooms ranging from delicate incurved globes to dramatic, spider-like forms, according to Duke Gardens. Matthews has said exhibit mums are beautiful, unique, varied in color, and evoke memories for those who grow them — but she has also warned that these varieties are threatened and could disappear if people stop growing them or learning about them, per the News & Observer's reporting.
That warning lines up with what growers elsewhere have described for years. Duke Gardens says exhibition-chrysanthemum growing is a dying art form because there are so few people who do it, noting that the National Chrysanthemum Society has around 450 members across the U.S. A 2015 article from The News & Observer put that national membership figure at about 425 at the time — a modest discrepancy with the garden's current estimate, though both describe a shrinking community of devoted growers. The same outlet reported that the Central Carolina Chrysanthemum Society, which organizes with Duke Gardens on this festival, had disbanded in 2007 before Matthews and others revived it.
Scarcity extends to the plants themselves. King's Mums, located in Oklahoma, is the only vendor that sells exhibition mum varieties nationwide, Duke Gardens says, and many cultivars aren't even available for sale — growers instead rely on cuttings passed along by friends. The Central Carolina Chrysanthemum Society describes its mission as protecting rare heirloom chrysanthemums from extinction and helping the public successfully grow what it calls extraordinary, vintage blooms.
The festival weekend offers a rare chance to see the results of that quiet preservation work up close, free of charge, in the middle of Durham. For growers like Matthews, who was also instrumental in creating the annual event featuring an indoor flower show, according to a 2021 feature from Aspire Metro, the stakes go beyond a single weekend display — it's about keeping a fading tradition blooming for whoever shows up next.
