Last night was the first ever Behind the Seeds – Glimmering Greenhouses tour and we were in attendance to check out the holiday twist on an EPCOT classic. A behind-the-scenes tour has been offered at The Land Pavilion since EPCOT opened in 1982, and the Glimmering Greenhouses tour is the latest spin on a guided walking tour. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Glimmering Greenhouses tour, show you what you can expect, and try to help you determine if this tour is a good option for you. We paid 100% for our Glimmering Greenhouses tour experience.

On a normal Behind the Seeds tour, guests visit a few more backstage rooms to learn more about the work done at The Land Pavilion, but the Glimmering Greenhouses tour focuses on the greenhouses, which are decorated for the holiday season.

We checked in about 20 minutes before the tour started at the Behind the Seeds desk at the exit to the Living with the Land attraction. During the check-in process, we signed some release forms and were handed pouches with listening devices inside. The listening devices are the ListenTALK Receiver Pro with a single, over-ear earphone that can be worn on the right or left ear.

Note that valid admission is required to enter EPCOT and is not included in the price of the Glimmering Greenhouses tour. During the tour, you’ll be on your feet the entire time with only extremely limited seating opportunities.

While a ride on Living with the Land is recommended prior to the tour, there is no preferred access offered to guests who are confirmed for the tour. If you are going to ride prior to the tour, make sure that you plan on riding an hour or more before your tour time. Living with the Land Glimmering Greenhouses is quite popular at night, so wait times can be longer than you may expect.

This tour takes you through backstage areas, starting from a door near the exit to the Soarin’ Around the World attraction. Our tour skipped some portions of the normal Behind the Seeds tour such as the bug room. We also skipped any information about the research lab. Instead, the Glimmering Greenhouses tour aims to get you into the greenhouses as soon as possible.

Guests are encouraged to take photos and videos as long as there is no flash used, which would be disruptive to guests on the actual Living with the Land attraction.

Our first stop on the tour is the final greenhouse of the ride where innovative growing techniques are on display and research is being done.

The Behind the Seeds – Glimmering Greenhouse tour remains a crop-focused tour, with some information overlapping with things you might learn on the daytime Behind the Seeds tour. That said, there is an extra focus on holiday foods and ingredients to add some festive cheer to the tour. Our first stop is at a display showcasing some holiday cookies, including a Walt Disney World favorite holiday snack: gingerbread.

We also learned some more about the Glimmering Greenhouses offering, including the history of the holiday lights on the Living with the Land attraction. You may know that the Glimmering Greenhouses name for the ride is new as Disney continues to embrace seasonal overlays for the Living with the Land attraction, but holiday decorations are not new for the attraction.

That said, Imagineering and the Living with the Land teams have expanded the light display, including some new lights this year. We’ll get to that in a minute. We learned that there are 100,000 lights in use for this year’s display, and that will likely continue to expand in the future. The installation takes about 6 weeks of tedious work designed to not interfere with or interrupt the crops on display.

As we continue on to the next greenhouse, we learn more about the growing techniques on display. Our tour guide, Rachel, was well-versed in the operations and history of the greenhouses. She was able to tell us information about when a lot of the plants were seeded, including some that were seeded years and years ago. For the Glimmering Greenhouses installation, plants need to be installed by August. Cast Members are already starting preparations for the 2025 EPCOT Flower & Garden Festival.

A fun photo op is available here, and there are little touches throughout the tour that make the tour feel special – including a number of things that you can only see and appreciate from the walkways of the tour.

It’s always cool to see a behind-the-scenes view of the impressive operations of The Land Pavilion greenhouses. Below, we can see the lettuce-growing area where unique designs can be found on display throughout the year. New to the Glimmering Greenhouses this year is a light canopy over the lettuce displays.

While learning about how food can play a part in holiday traditions, we learned about a tradition to hide a pickle in the Christmas tree. While the tradition/myth origins are…less than solid…the tradition continues anyway, and a glass pickle has been hidden within the vegetable canopy on the attraction. It’s only visible from the Glimmering Greenhouses tour.

Other holiday traditions that we learned about on the tour included a Greek New Year’s Eve tradition to smash a pomegranate for good luck and prosperity in the new year. An Icelandic tradition, Jólabókaflóð, includes exchanging books and the use of the cocoa bean to make hot chocolate for some Christmas Eve reading. Wherever you look, crops found within the Living with the Land greenhouses play a part in holiday traditions.

In the next greenhouse, we learned more about the growing techniques used here. Drip irrigation allows for water to be delivered right to the roots of a plant without having to soak through the soil first. This is a good way to conserve water in difficult environments.

As we head into the Aquacell, a section of the greenhouses dedicated to fish farming, we get to walk right next to the ride path for the first time. It’s cool to have a unique vantage point of the attraction without the constant movement from the flowing water carrying the boat. You get to spend much more time in each section, and we found the tour to be rather lenient, allowing guests an extra moment or two to enjoy something that may have been of interest. You still move along as a group, but there is enough space for you to take a closer look at something interesting along the way.

The Aquacell is much darker than other portions of the ride, even containing a unique roof covering when compared to other portions of the ride. It can also be a bit louder in this room due to the constantly working water pumps for the fish. Again, the over-ear receivers save the day here.

Similar to the narration on the ride, we learn a little bit about the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Speaking of the narration of the ride, we learned that the voice actor used for the attraction is local to Central Florida, making it easier for the Living with the Land teams to update the narration on the attraction such as the update for the Glimmering Greenhouses offering.

As we move through this Aquacell, we can get a closer look at the fish, including some Aquacell-inspired wrapping paper created by Walt Disney Imagineering to celebrate the different fish in this part of the attraction. In fact, Walt Disney Imagineering is responsible for the creation of much of the themed wrapping paper on display throughout the attraction.

As we make our way into the final room, we start to see the impressive dome revealed in front of us. This dome is the first room that you enter on the attraction, but because we walked the ride route backward, it’s the final room for our walking tour.

As we make our way along the narrowing walking path, our unique viewpoints of the attraction continue.

At this final educational stop, our tour guide had an interactive display ready. Here, we passed around unlabeled spices to try and identify, with our noses, which spice was in the jar. This was a fun part of the tour, allowing guests to smell something in a raw form for the first time. One of the highlights was being able to smell frankincense and myrrh, which are dried tree sap from trees common to Somalia and Ethiopia. Frankincense and myrrh are synonymous with the Christmas story.

I’ll start with what this tour is not: this is not a behind-the-scenes tour exclusively focused on the holiday lights display. The Glimmering Greenhouses tour does offer a unique view of the lights and some fun tidbits, but it is still very much a Behind the Seeds tour that is focused on the crops found in the Living with the Land attraction.

As a quick aside, I wish that Walt Disney World would bring back a proper holiday tour that primarily showcases the impressive work that Disney’s Holiday Services team does each year.

Ok, with that out of the way, I’ll try to define what this tour actually is. During the tour, you can expect to spend the vast, vast majority of your time in the Glimmering Greenhouses. This is smart and exactly what guests really want. It wouldn’t make sense to spend any amount of time in the pest management area or to spend time learning about the research going on: give us the Christmas lights!

That means that you do skip some of the more informational portions of the standard Behind the Seeds tour, so it’s not really the full Behind the Seeds experience either. The overlap of information is enough that makes the Glimmering Greenhouses tour feel very similar to guests who have done the Behind the Seeds tour, but there isn’t enough overlap to make Glimmering Greenhouses a substitute for the traditional Behind the Seeds tour. In fewer words: Disney did a good job of making Glimmering Greenhouses something all its own.

At $45, it’s a “cheap” tour, which makes it accessible to more guests than some of Walt Disney World’s more expensive tours. It’s hard to say that this isn’t worth it because of the lower price point.

That said, I think that the tour is missing one thing: a ride on the Living with the Land attraction. Because the Glimmering Greenhouses overall is popular, wait times after sunset see a resurgence, and can often be the longest posted wait times of the day. While it’s easier for guests of the normal Behind the Seeds tour to brave a 15-minute wait during the day, it’s a tougher ask for Glimmering Greenhouse tour guests when the wait time is 45 minutes.

If the tour included an expedited, exclusive ride on Living with the Land after the tour concluded, this tour would be a home run. To be honest, the views of the lights, while still impressive on the tour, don’t compare to the views from the attraction itself. With tour groups of just 14 people twice per night, I think it would be easy to add this to the end of each tour.

Overall, we enjoyed the tour. It’s just $45, and you get to spend upwards of 45 minutes in the greenhouses. There is enough information during the tour to justify it as an educational offering while providing unique, behind-the-scenes views that the traditional Behind the Seeds tour is known for.

The Glimmering Greenhouses tour is Walt Disney World’s only holiday tour offered at the moment, so it gets extra points for taking advantage of the most wonderful time of the year. It’s great to see and hear the hard work that the Living with the Land team does each year to create Walt Disney World’s best holiday lights display.

As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!