What It’s Like to Hang Nasturtiums at the Gardner Museum

Lowering the bright orange flowers into the courtyard is an extremely delicate job.

By Madeline Bilis· 3/28/2017, 5:32 p.m.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is closed to the public on Tuesdays, but on this particular Tuesday, the place is a quiet flurry of activity.

Inside, a small team of horticulturists is working to install the famed hanging nasturtiums in the museum’s idyllic courtyard. They’re a serious bunch, and they should be—one wrong move would destroy nine months of hard work. They’ve been carefully tending to the nasturtiums in an off-site greenhouse in Hingham over the winter, and now, some vines measure up to 15 feet long.

The flowers are a vibrant (and fragrant) harbinger of springtime. The orange blooms are indeed a treat for the senses if you’re able to see them in time. While it takes months to grow the vines, the short-lived display only lasts for three weeks.

“We’re tricking them into thinking it’s June, when they flower,” says Grace Coburn, a horticulturist at the museum. As she raises a platform to hop inside a truck full of nasturtiums, she explains draping the flowers down the four walls of the courtyard is a delicate job.

“You lower (them) as much as you can before you just let go and hold your breath,” she says. While it’s typically only one person who hangs the vines, it takes four people to carry them upstairs, and another to coach the lowering.

The museum’s chief horticulturist, Stan Kozak, has worked on the nasturtium display for the past 48 years. The installation of the orange flowers is one of the most anticipated days of the year at the Gardner, but Kozak isn’t dwelling on today.

“I’m not going to be happy until two or three days from now when they’re all turned up toward the sunlight,” he says of the flowers, adding “They’ve gone through a lot of stress today.”

So has he.