Butchart Gardens Fireworks
The summer fireworks show at Butchart Gardens is the most amazing light show I have ever seen in my life. This is a fact.
Megan and I saw the fireworks on our honeymoon on Vancouver Island this summer. In the same way that it is difficult to express how precisely a piece of music can lift your heart, I find it difficult to say how the Butchart Gardens fireworks show so easily surpassed all others. First, I’ll tell you that it’s not big fat American fireworks. Americans like big, abstract shows of force, big crescendos and no finesse or plot. This show, on the other hand was choreographed beautifully with elements of interpretive and representative art. The presentation had both technical and artistic brilliance. There was a sublime nature to it. It had dancing elephants (literally! well sparkling outlines of elephants so technically it would be “figuratively!”), Busby Berkeley mandala formations, great music, the glow of the early universe, firelit forests and so much more! I recall one moment where I saw two fireworks and their trails corkscrewing up, intertwined before they started to fall back to earth and explode; I’ve only seen intertwined trails in cartoons, I never thought there’d be any way such precision and beauty could happen in the real world!
The “big universe” scene was the most breathtaking. That’s the only name I could imagine for it. The sky above us kept slowly filling with clouds and sparks and rockets. It felt like we were all inside a star nebula! The colors and shapes forming were just like some I had seen by the Hubble Telescope, but real, live, now! Stars glowed, illuminating clouds. Shooting stars flew through our weightless universe and we were there.
Oh my, only poetry can convey how my heart felt at that moment!
That was so inspiring! I love fireworks. We have two great shows here every summer, both set to music (one at the conclusion of our summer music festival, with recorded music from the artists who have performed during the week; and one during our symphony’s annual outdoor concert of American pops music). The Butchart show sounds right up my alley, with more artistry than flash.