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It’s a slow time of year for Maine’s midcoast communities, with summer well in the past and the brilliant colors of autumn mostly gone.
That’s why some towns have gotten creative and leaned into the holidays as a way to keep people visiting and spending their money at local businesses.
Few places have embraced it more than Boothbay, where a decade ago, the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens realized that it could take advantage of the natural lull in its calendar and keep its workers on through the winter. It began an annual holiday light display that’s now the biggest in Maine and one of the most well-regarded in the nation.
The Gardens Aglow light display recently began its 10th year, with about a mile of paths leading visitors through gardens that are completely dark except for 750,000 LED holiday lights. If laid out end-to-end, the lights would stretch 66 miles in total — or the distance from Boothbay to South Portland.
Among the highlights are 300 sculptures made of lights, depicting things such as mushrooms and native animals including birds, a fox and a turtle. There are also more quintessentially coastal designs, including a swimming whale, a giant lobster and a tall lighthouse, all of which combine with the wavering blue LEDs to create the feel of being in a glowing sea.
Other features this year will include the return of so-called fairy houses made by the garden’s volunteers and the encouragement of visitors to dress up as fairies on Fridays.
The display will be up until the end of December and be open to the public from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Tickets must be purchased ahead of time online.
The lights have now brought more than 780,000 visitors to the Boothbay region since they started, and the community has responded by creating a corresponding event called Boothbay Lights that promotes its food and shops.
“Of course, the plants stop growing in October, and we needed something that would both extend the season in terms of bringing in some revenue, but also giving the team something to do,” said President and CEO Gretchen Ostherr.
Uniquely, everything at Gardens Aglow is done in-house, Ostherr said. Volunteers and employees design and produce everything, from the light sculptures to the flickering lights in the trees to the decoration of the garden’s towering wooden troll figures. Beforehand, workers get a lesson in doing so safely.
“We have talented people on our team who build them and then who light them, and who come up with the idea for them in the first place,” Ostherr said.
Right after each event, staff begin working on the following year’s design and usually finish it by July, Ostherr said. Starting in September, a team of about six begins working on the show full-time, and a team of about 25 horticulturists spend one day per week helping out. Right before the event, all staff and the garden’s 200 volunteers lend a hand to get it over the finish line.
While the size of the show is impressive, Ostherr said the team has begun to think less about making it bigger each year, and more about making it sustainable for the environment and the workers.
For example, to save plant life, the garden is using more colorful uplighting rather than wrapping as many trees in lights, Ostherr said.
Ostherr said Gardens Aglow will likely sell out, so anyone planning on attending should grab their tickets soon.
