As the landscape supervisor at the Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Patterson has designed the seasonal light show there for the last nine years. The show runs through Jan. 8. Where do you get ideas for the light show? We try to create what we have in the garden. Most other holiday shows have animated Santas and reindeers, snowmen and big wrapped presents. Here we have big flower forms, animal forms and things in nature. We make 95 percent of our forms in-house. We always look at (visitor comments) to get ideas from the public. Last year somebody asked for an animated beehive, so we made a four-and-a-half-foot-tall animated beehive for this year’s show.
What’s the most unique design that you’ve made? We have two very intricate forms this year. One’s a flying geese form. It’s about 20 forms. It has geese in a V formation, and it’s animated from 45 feet up in a tree. They fly down in a V to the ground. They land. They walk around the ground. Then the V formation flies off into another tree about 20 feet up in the air. That was about six-and-a-half months of design. We also have two squirrels that chase each other around the trunk of a tree. They come down to the bottom. Then they go all the way back up to the top of the tree and it just loops over again. That was probably about 35 or 40 forms of squirrels and about four or five months of planning.
How is this show different from the others out there? A lot of the other shows are drive-throughs. Here you get out of your car, you walk through our show. We have live music in our visitor’s center. We have hot drinks and food. We have an indoor train display at one of our conservatories. It’s a completely different experience. – Rachel Baye
