For the past five years, Brookside Gardens landscaping supervisor Jeff Patterson has been designing the display for the Garden of Lights, an 11-year holiday institution in Montgomery County.
How much does the display change from year to year?
We did a new theme this year; we did the seasons. There’s two winter scenes, a summer scene and a fall scene. We also have a lot of big animals, such as an 8-foot-tall Loch Ness Monster.
How many lights go into the show?
We used about 700,000 strands of lights this year; each year, we add around 40,000. This year we’re using about 40 percent LED lights, which use half the energy than normal lights use.
How do you come up with ideas for the displays?
I take a walk around the garden to think of ideas of what I can recreate in lights. I’ll do a drawing of it, and work with another person to transform that into the lights. Some times we kind of go off reactions we get from the crowd. We had a winter scene a few years ago and a lot of people liked it, so we decided to go with a whole seasonal theme.
Does anything funny happen behind the scenes when you’re setting up the lights?
The funniest stuff happens at the gates; people pull up and say they didn’t realize how much the admission costs and say, “Oh, I’ll have to get my kids’ allowance money back.” And it’s funny to see how many people will cram into one vehicle, since we charge by the car. Our staff also plays tricks on each other: One year I threatened to throw someone into the pond, people will swipe others’ lights and they’ll wonder what happened to them.
How many visitors do you get each year?
Last year we had close to 40,000.
How did you get roped into doing this?
I used to do turf grass and irrigation here. When my boss retired, they said, “OK, the light show’s yours.” I’ve always had kind of a creative side, so it came somewhat easily to me.
