Enchanted Woods (Classic)
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Once upon a time, there were two little sisters, Pauline and Ruth DuPont. |
| 0:09.5 | And they lived in a massive, luxurious mansion in Wilmington, Delaware. |
| 0:14.1 | They were the daughters of Henry Francis DuPont, one of the heirs of the very powerful DuPont business dynasty. |
| 0:21.6 | Pauline and Ruth just wanted to play. |
| 0:24.9 | But the DuPont mansion was full of all of this expensive art and furniture. |
| 0:30.2 | They pretty much lived in a museum, but in the bad way, |
| 0:33.1 | where everything had to be just so, and you couldn't touch anything. |
| 0:37.1 | And as one of the daughters wrote to her father in one of her Christmas cards, |
| 0:40.7 | she made a poem in the Christmas card that talked about living in a house where you're not allowed to sit on the furniture. |
| 0:47.0 | One place the kids were allowed to play was in the extensive 60-acre garden. |
| 0:52.2 | Sometimes the girls would take their books out there to read, |
| 0:55.2 | and even at some point they were able to convince Daddy DuPont to add in a swing set. |
| 1:00.2 | That was a little home away from home. |
| 1:02.5 | In the early 1950s, the entire estate was turned into the Winterthur Museum garden and library. |
| 1:09.9 | But it wouldn't be until the year 2000, |
| 1:12.3 | when the museum staff, |
| 1:13.9 | inspired by the story of Ruth and Pauline's respites into the garden, |
| 1:18.2 | used that story as a launching pad to create what is now the enchanted woods. |
| 1:24.3 | There's so many artistic moments in the garden, |
| 1:27.2 | moments that lead children to take a flight with their imagination, because they see something they've never seen before. |
| 1:37.9 | My name is Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. |
| 1:49.0 | Today, we go to Wilmington, Delaware, to the enchanted woods at Winterthur Gardens, this four-acre garden, |
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