An Annual Orchid Extravaganza Brings Tropical Warmth to Winter at Cheekwood

Never mind figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This winter’s whimsical math problem is calculating how many orchids can dangle from a chandelier.

That’s the type of creative horticultural engineering that goes into producing Orchids at Cheekwood, an exhibit that transforms the mansion’s stately loggia, stairwell and receiving rooms into a lush and lavish tropical daydream.

In its eighth year, Orchids returns to the mansion from Feb. 7 through March 8, easing the bleak chill of winter with a warm palette of white, yellow and soft peachy orange. Orchids 2026 will likely be remembered as the “year with the chandeliers,” says Mary Weber, Cheekwood Estate & Gardens’ director of horticulture. That’s because the centerpiece of the extravagance features dramatic mobiles of live flora, such as Dendrobium, Beallara, Howeara and Oncidium (aka dancing ladies) descending densely, as decadent drapery.

“Each year is always a different design, and we always have a different challenge,” Mary says. This year’s challenge includes calculating the load of hundreds of flowers on armatures suspended from lofty chandeliers, not to mention the additional weight of periodic watering.

Mary and the Cheekwood team, including exhibits manager Mark Simmons, collaborate on Orchids with Florida-based Tres Fromme of 3. Fromme Design. The master-planning and garden design firm helped develop Cheekwood’s Bracken Foundation Children’s Garden, which opened in 2020. It has also advised for more than a decade on the popular Cheekwood Holiday LIGHTS tradition, and it recently partnered on Cheekwood’s elegant boxwood and azalea entry garden at the 2026 Antiques & Garden Show at the Music City Center.

When it comes to marrying the mansion’s timeless architecture with orchids’ fleeting beauty, Tres starts sketching in late summer, eventually creating a mood board with a unified theme for the displays that will weave throughout the mansion. Then Mary, Mark and their green-thumbed botanical squad translate the design concept into the language of flowers, calculating the number of plants needed and sourcing orchids from as far away as Hawaii, California and Canada, and as close to home as greenhouses in Alabama.  

Meanwhile, rooms between the major exhibits showcase complementary orchid-forward tabletop and floor displays by Nashville-based Rose Hill Flowers, which dazzled visitors at 2025’s Fleurs de Ville exhibit with a floral mannequin in the mansion’s morning room, inspired by the museum’s oil portrait “Lady in White.”

The annual monthlong celebration of tropical flora includes related workshops and classes, in which participants can design their own orchid arrangements, build their own terraria, and learn to sketch orchids using charcoal. Classes sell out early, and waitlists are already building. 

But there’s still time to show up at the end of the exhibit to rehome an orchid or two. The week of March 9, Mary and co. strike the set, dismantling the displays and making the elegant plants available for sale, enlivening Nashville’s modern-day homes in a style befitting one of America’s great country houses.