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Feature: Festival highlights Christmas season in Vancouver's Van Dusen Botanical Garden

Xinhua, December 12, 2015 Adjust font size:

Taking photos in well-known Van Dusen Botanical Garden in Canada's western coastal city of Vancouver has become a new hobby for amateur photographer George Sandor.

The Christmas season is the best time of the year for a photographer like Sandor, who especially likes to take photos on winter nights, as the garden is lit up with countless decorative lights.

"It's lovely, just beautiful, just magical," Sandor told Xinhua on Friday night at the garden.

Every December, the botanical garden welcomes more than 100,000 visitors, who come to stroll through the six-hectare garden and enjoy the festive decorations and lights.

For many, taking photos with family and friends is the best part, but snapping the perfect shot of the lights in the darkness can be tricky. Sandor, however, said he enjoyed the challenge.

"You just have to try it out and see what the best setting is. It's very difficult because they do give a glow and so they're always looking like they're glowing. So you just have to try it out and see what the result is," he said.

Usually, the garden is decorated with a total of more than 1 million light bulbs during the Christmas season. This year, however, the staff have lit up an additional five acres of the garden and the extra lights stretch along a distance of 1 kilometer.

Two decades ago, a park board staffer came up with the idea of the light festival in the hope that it would make the garden more attractive, which led to the Festival of Lights over the past 19 years.

Bill Manning, director of the park, told Xinhua that having lights in a botanical garden would be a great way for people to follow the tradition of celebrating Christmas in the garden.

"It has grown and grown over the years with the technology that we have with lights and sound. It's become a real spectacular event, and people use this as one of their Christmas traditions," he said.

The display, which has doubled in size compared to the one last year, has taken organizers the entire month of November to set up.

Manning said he was expecting visitors and photographers to be visiting the garden throughout December to the New Year, with an ever-increasing amount of lights each year illuminating the night sky. Endi