Throughout the past several years, one of the great Arkansas holiday traditions has been to make the annual pilgrimage to see the thousands of Christmas lights on display at Garvan Woodland Gardens near Hot Springs.
Though the line is often extremely long just to get to the parking lot — and almost just as long to get inside the venue — thousands of Arkansans brave the traffic to see spectacular decorations that would put even the most crotchety Scrooge into the Christmas spirit.
Located along Lake Hamilton, the land now known as Garvan Woodland Gardens was bought by Malvern businessman Arthur Cook in the mid-1920s to harvest timber to manufacture wood flooring at his mill, Wisconsin-Arkansas Lumber Co. Not long after his purchase, Cook’s land became a large peninsula, when Arkansas Power & Light (now Entergy Arkansas) built Carpenter Dam on the Ouachita River, creating Lake Hamilton.
Cook died in a vehicle accident in 1934. After his death, Cook’s wife and daughters acquired the land and Cook’s two companies: Wisconsin-Arkansas Lumber and Malvern Brick & Tile. The youngest daughter, Verna, took control of the Cook family’s businesses. She and her husband Patrick Garvan managed Malvern Brick & Tile for 40 years until they sold the business to Acme Brick in the 1970s.
After the sale of the business, Verna Garvan became a self-taught gardener and conservationist. For more than 30 years, she designed and developed her own large-scale garden. Verna and her husband had dreams of building a grand home on the property, but that dream ended when Patrick became ill and died in 1975.
But Verna continued to develop the beautiful grounds, deciding that she should share the garden with her fellow Arkansans. She contacted an old family friend, longtime Malvern Brick & Tile employee Warren Bankson, to help her create a plan to share the gardens with the public.
Eventually, Verna realized that she and Bankson did not have the necessary expertise to develop the large-scale botanical garden she had dreamed of. And so, in November 1985, she signed a trust agreement with the University of Arkansas that would allow the university’s architecture school and landscape architecture program to operate the gardens in perpetuity for the citizens of Arkansas, with the understanding she would maintain control until her death. As stated in the agreement, her motivation for bequeathing the property to the university was to “serve as a tribute to natural preservation in the twentieth century.” Verna was stricken with cancer and died on Oct. 1, 1993.
In 1996, the University of Arkansas asked Behnke & Associates of Cleveland to develop a 25-year master plan for the gardens. In 2000, the university officially named the property Garvan Woodland Gardens. The gardens officially opened to the public on April 7, 2002.
Starting in November 2002, Garvan Woodland Gardens began its massive holiday light display, which now consists of more than 5 million Christmas lights. A crew of about 30 begins working in mid-August to have the display ready for its mid-November opening. The display is open through Dec. 31 but closed on Christmas Day. For more information on hours of operation and admission prices, you can visit garvangardens.org.
The sight of millions of twinkling lights is amazing, but remember it will take quite a bit of time to get there, park and stand in line to begin your journey through the gardens. While it’s all part of the celebration of the birth of Christ, you'll need the patience of Job to see it.
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