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Over winter break, thousands of people flocked to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens near Piedmont Park for its famed Festival of Lights. With strings of holiday lights covering more than 30 acres of stunning greenery each year, the winter exhibits at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens have become an essential Atlanta holiday experience. The brilliant display of lights made the Botanical Gardens a glimmering beacon in Atlanta’s night sky from 5 to 10 p.m. throughout the holiday season.
This year especially, the glimmering Garden sparkled with new imagination. Its Imaginary Worlds event brightened the glow of the third annual extravaganza by featuring lights that turned its huge sculptures into dazzling creatures of the night.
The face of the Garden’s famed Earth Mother was framed in sparkling green, and the giant Cobras at the entrance were a glittering red and white. The Garden even featured a light show of glowing orbs choreographed to music on the “Great Lawn.”
“Very beautiful … like an enchanted forest!” spectator Cynthia Koscinch said.
Hot beverages, holiday cocktails, beer and wine were sold at tents throughout the exhibit, and every night at 5 p.m., the Edible Garden’s Glow Bar jammed out with hip songs from an award-winning Lethal Rhythms DJ.
A few civic-minded Atlantans first proposed a botanical garden for the city in 1973, and since then, the conservatory has celebrated holidays with a glowing passion. In December of 1979, Atlanta Botanical Garden, Inc., held a Country Christmas celebration, the first of many festivals to be staged on the terrace. Its merrymaking later extended to its first Garden of Eden Ball in 1980, its first concerts on the Great Lawn in 1984, its first Cocktails in the Garden in 2003, and its first “Garden Lights, Holiday Nights” tradition beginning in 2011.
The exhibits at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens have been growing for more than 35 years, and debuting with more than 1 million LEDs, the event attracted droves of local families to the Garden. Still, the conservatory promises to add even more lights each year.
“Let’s just say I didn’t know this amount of awesome could exist in the middle of the city!” Garden go-er Nathan James said.
While the Festival of Lights had many brilliant colors, the most prominent might have been green. The light show’s exclusive use of energy efficient LED’s consumes more than 80 percent less electricity than incandescents. The Garden’s effort to conserve energy has been quite a success. Garden Lights runs on 300 watts of power, less than the amount used by 15 average homes on an average day.
The light show shone nightly from Nov. 16 to Jan. 4, so if you missed it, be sure to get tickets for next year if you want to witness the phosphorescent spectacle for yourself.
Until then, you can still go to the Garden for its beautiful exhibits year-round or attend its upcoming event, “Orchid Daze: Lasting Impressions,” which celebrates the work of three artists who found creative energy in the beauty of landscapes: Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. The exhibition is designed to showcase these artists’ eye-opening ways of seeing the world around them.
Or if you’re feeling artistic, stop by the Atlanta Botanical Gardens’ Fuqua Orchid Center Art Gallery to enjoy Exotic Tropicals, a unique collection of botanical drawings by students of Garden art instructor Carol Anne Sutherland. Both exhibits are showcased from Feb. 8 to April 13 and are not only fun, but educational as well.
