After nine years designing the Blossoms of Lights at the Denver Botanic Gardens, Mark Payne pretty much has the art of draping trees and bushes down to a science. Though not an exact science.
When he stands back and takes in the glow and twinkle of his work, he always sees a spot where things might be just a little brighter or better. This year, his favorite bit of the annual holiday stroll is a 60- foot pine loaded with 250 strands of blue LED lights.
“You can’t miss it,” he says. “But if I had it to do again, I would have piled another 50 strands on it.”
He learned his craft as a fill- in laborer at the gardens.
“We worked for a week and a half, and one of the last trees we did, we put entirely too many lights on it. People were irritated,” Payne admits. “But the tree that was a mistake ended up being on the cover of the newspaper. From that mistake a new style and a new quality of lighting display was born.”
The next year, his company ACA Landscape was hired to take over the annual task of stringing in the neighborhood of a million lights across the gardens to create a true winter wonder.
He’ll start planning for next year’s show in January, before this year’s display comes down. “We come up with the design, get it approved by the Botanic Gardens and make our light order in February. We normally receive the order in June and then start prepping all the lights in August.”
His crew of pros helped by garden volunteers gets going big-time in November, working seven days a week, sometimes late into the night, layering thousands of loops of lights, colored, white, twinkling and not, through the 23-acre park near the center of the city. “It has to be over the top for people to actually notice,” Payne says.
At home, Payne has a solo strand of lighted garland indoors. “That is it,” he says. “Nothing outside at all. When the gardens are done, I am done.”
Tip: Don’t be afraid of color in your home display. Try to do things in layers of color, so things have depth. Do one color in front, another on the side, and if you can, go LED all the way.
Dana Coffield
