Atlanta Botanical’s ‘Garden Lights’ brighter, bolder for 2012

How does your garden glow?

No, that’s not a typo. It’s one way the Atlanta Botanical Garden could update the time-tested nursery rhyme question for Saturday night’s opening of the second annual “Garden Lights, Holiday Nights.” Or maybe even better: “How does your attendance grow?”

Leaders of the 30-acre Midtown attraction projected that its inaugural holiday light show would draw 25,000 last year, whispering wishfully that the number might go as high as 40,000. But then visitors swarmed, especially on weekends, for a boldly hued walk-through illuminated extravaganza quite unlike any other in the metro area. By the time the seven-week run ended, 106,000 had turned out.

So how does the attraction, emboldened by such success during a season that had long been a dead zone, aim to top that?

Well, nothing exceeds like excess. The garden’s creative team has plugged in 1.5 million LED lights, a half-million more than last year, expanded the decorations into new areas and broadened the bold palette of colors.

As a result, “Garden Lights” is even more of an eye-popping experience, an artful illumination that emphasizes the sculptural shapes of trees and shrubs, defying conventions of predictable red-and-green, snowflake-and-lollipop-dominated holiday displays. Yet, as with last year, it somehow still strongly conveys the spirit of the season.

“Adding more has been better,” lead designer Tres Fromme said. “The show is brighter, bolder, more magical.”

But strolling the grounds with him one crisp night this week, it was clear that the garden’s creative team had done more than merely turn up the volume.

To start with, areas where there was little illumination before are now seeing the light. A sidewalk bordering the Southern Seasons Garden, for instance, has been transformed into the “Starry Night Walk,” inspired by the Van Gogh masterpiece, sparkling with dozens of swirling stars.

The Cascades Garden, dark except for some sidewalk luminaries last year, boasts a “Liquid Lights” display featuring spraying fountains bathed in cool blue and “glacial” white light. Nearby is a grove of “Ice Storm Trees” covered in a new kind of LED fixture that twinkles from the ends of wire “spurs,” lending the trunks and branches an ice-covered appearance.

These stand in intended contrast to the Dr. Seuss-style red-orange, purple and green showcased on the other side of the entry road in Storza Woods (newly renamed “Funky Forest”), where the trunks of 21 trees, twice as many as last year, are wrapped in lights up to 30 feet from ground level. In the middle of the woods, the garden’s architectural icon, Canopy Walk, is now underlit in an orangy glow by spotlights.

Here and elsewhere, designers were attempting a more layered look of lights in the foreground, midground and background, with more sparkle at eye level, Fromme said. He was a freelance garden designer in Dallas when he choreographed the first “Holiday Lights,” but this year he joined the garden’s staff as landscape design and planning manager.

To bring more attention to the Botanical Garden’s killer wintertime view of Atlanta’s skyline, the Holiday Model Train Show has been moved and expanded to a newly erected mound at Alston Overlook.

Close by, kids and their parents can make the acquaintance of first-time mascot Lumina, a garden sprite in a shimmering silver costume who waves an illuminated magic wand. Created in partnership with Serenbe Playhouse, Lumina is primed to pose for smartphone and camera shots with kids of all ages. (It’s probably best to do this before visiting the fire pits where children can make a mess — in more ways than one — of s’mores.)

For adults seeking refuge from all that family-friendliness, Glow Bar, a disco-ball-lit area between the conservatory (the junglelike “Radiant Rainforest”) and Edible Garden (“Brilliant Bugs”), opens this year. After 8 nightly, they can order the specialty drink, the Rudolph, a cranberry-champagne cocktail.

Whether it’s hot chocolate or something stronger, it’s good to have a warming beverage to sip while taking in “Garden Light’s” centerpiece, “Orchestral Orbs,” 150 glowing fiberglass globes and spheres planted on the Great Lawn. Amid a garden bathed in 1.5 million lights, it’s cool to watch these lights in front of the conservatory change to the beat of songs such as Aaron Neville’s soulful “Louisiana Christmas Day” and Michael Bublé’s “Feeling Good.”

To ensure that you will share the latter sentiment, the garden will cap ticket sales at 4,500 each night and is offering discounted “off-peak” pricing early in the week.