Holiday display ready to greet Manito visitors

Kathleen Miller spends three weeks stringing lights, arranging poinsettias and hanging decorations for the Gaiser Conservatory Holiday Lights show at Manito Park.

Miller designs and maintains all the conservatory’s displays, but this annual flower and plant display is special.

“It’s what I live for all year long,” she said. “I happen to have been born on Christmas Day, so Christmas is very special to me. It gives me more pleasure than you know. It’s my winter wonderland.”

The show starts on Friday and runs through December 16 at the indoor conservatory near Manito’s Duncan Gardens.

The scent of blooming paperwhites already fills the air, and visitors to the free show will be greeted with an ornament-bedecked Norfolk Island Pine, more than 650 poinsettias, a decades-old, bloom-heavy Christmas cactus and 30,000 Christmas lights.

Other decorations are tucked amongst the orchids, cacti, blooming plants and towering trees.

Some plants feature clusters of lights held together with floral tape and arranged into displays on stakes. Miller calls them “torches.”

“We created that,” said Miller of the arrangements, which save delicate plants from the weight of strings of lights. “We jokingly say we are going to patent it one day and retire.”

Though Spokane Parks Department staff set up the display and grow the plants in the greenhouse, the Friends of Manito volunteer group contributed $2,000 this year for lights and other supplies, said Jeff Hunter, Friends of Manito’s chairman for the show. “We view it as our Christmas present to the community,” Hunter said. “It’s just magical to see how people react to it.”

Miller is hoping her own floral gift will be ready in time for Christmas.

A giant, white bird of paradise has produced its first bud after three years in the main atrium.

Now everyone is just waiting for it to bloom.