[dreamy music]
- Dave Barko: We're a botanical-themed light show.
We have over 350,000 lights.
Something you probably never seen before.
My name is Dave Barko.
I'm the architect and designer of the Garden of Lights.
[festive instrumental]
We start in early October.
It takes about six to seven weeks for us to set up.
I'm gonna start some staking and path lighting.
[pounding]
I started doing this back in 1997.
That was our first year of the light show.
And I've been part of it ever since then.
Plug 'em in, and away we go.
When we started, we had no idea what we were doing. [laughs]
We just put a lot of extension cords out.
We just threw a lot of lights,
whatever we could find at the stores.
It was under a hundred thousand lights at that time.
A good day is when nothing that goes wrong--
That's a great day.
And it seems like every night,
there's something that either got unplugged
or got chewed on by critters and things like that.
Dirty little buggers!
Dave: We'll change something.
Something doesn't look right.
We'll straighten things out.
[festive samba and jazz]
And we have about a two-acre pond
and that's my favorite spot.
What we call "Lake of Lights."
And the lights go way up pretty high.
People 15, 20 miles away were seeing--
It looked like search lights going up in the sky.
So, it actually was kind of like a beacon.
It would bring people to the garden.
[jazz music]
People are able to walk through
a 7-foot by 70-foot caterpillar
and there's 20,000 lights on it.
There's 18 different colors.
Some are pretty unique.
We've got some champagne- looking colors on here.
- So you're able to immerse yourself through this tunnel.
People absolutely love that.
I do not buy lights or frames from stores,
or anything like that,
so they're all custom-made for us.
Now the more popular one is what we call the icicle forest.
They're just dangling in the woods
and it gives a real frosty feel to it.
People like it 'cause it's silent and solitude.
It takes a lot of patience,
but it's just trying to do stuff
that no one else has done before.
[jingle bells]
The thing that excites me the most
is just hearing what people have to say about it.
- Child: Whoa, I wanna go see that!
- Dave Barco: That's a wonderful feeling
to have families come through and smiling,
creating a memory for themselves.
- Woman: I wanna take a picture of all three of us in front of...
- Dave: This is my 26th year.
I'm honored to be part of the botanical garden.
I've considered myself lucky to be part of this place
and experience all these years I've had.
It's a happy time of year for people to come on out
and I just enjoy that aspect of it.
[jazz]