The Garden: Moonlight Man

Gardens and gardeners up north are getting ready for the long winter, but down south the struggle with weeds, blights, parasites and pests goes on all year long. Particularly in Texas, where a tree is a cherished possession, often imported from the north, planted, fed, and cosseted like a sickly child. In Texas a millionaire may lay out a quarter of a million dollars building hills, engineering creeks, hauling rocks, irrigating shrubs and grass. And with all that expenditure, it seems a shame to leave it out in the dark at night. The result is a boom in a relatively new form of esthetics—landscape illumination.

Perhaps the busiest practitioner of this fast-growing trade is tall, bespectacled John Watson, 40, of Dallas. His specialty is creating moonlight, though he produces a myriad other effects to order. His work has taken him to both East and West coasts and as far north as Canada, but most of his clients are in the Southwest. For, quite aside from the pleasure an oil baron gets from seeing his flora through the picture window, he needs night lighting for another reason. The incinerating Texas sunshine discourages bosky browsing in the landscaped areas; southwestern millionaires take their ease among the trees as the gods once did—during the cool of the evening.

Subtle Shadows. Moonlighter Watson prepared for his career at Texas A. & M., where he earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture, then spent four years at General Electric’s lamp headquarters in Cleveland. For the past five years his headquarters has been Dallas, where he lives alone in a small, painting-filled house with a backyard garden that serves as his sample room.

Watson demonstrates his effects for prospective clients by flicking switches and rheostats on a large console that controls 100 lighting fixtures, 179 switches and four miles of wire packed into his small Japanese garden. The lights themselves are mostly small and invisible, mounted on trees or behind bushes. “The important thing is to achieve an understatement of light—subtle and restful,” says Watson. Many of his clients need considerable convincing on this point; a floodlight seems to them the best way to illuminate a tree that cost $1,500.

“Overall floodlight is repulsive,” Watson says. “What I do when I show people my garden is to build the moonlight effect up slowly, then build highlights and subtle shadows. Then suddenly I turn it all off and flash a floodlight on the garden. Everybody always says, ‘Oh, no!’ and from that moment I know I’ve got a convert, and the husband knows he’s going to have to spend some money. Floodlights are for finding your automobile in the driveway or for carrying the garbage out to the trash can. But not for gardens.”

Red in the Moonlight. Watson has illuminated some 500 gardens during the past five years, ranging in price from $250 for a garden 10 ft. by 15 ft. to about $100,000 for one of his current projects, the 17-acre garden of Dallas’ electronics and aircraft tycoon James Ling. “No two clients want the same effect,” he says. “Color is the tricky thing.”

One color is important to Oil Geologist D. Harold (“Dry Hole”) Byrd, in whose two-acre Dallas garden Watson was putting the finishing touches on a $16,200 installation. The color is red. “See those three purple beeches,” said Byrd to a visitor. “While the moonlight’s going, I can throw a switch, and a series of powerful red lights plays on those tree trunks. I know Watson didn’t care much for it. But I like red.” Mr. Byrd’s sharp eyes grew pensive. He said: “I’m trying to figure out some way to have a big American flag lit up out there.”

Overhearing this, Watson hastily looked the other way.