The gardening staff and volunteers string more than three hundred thousand Christmas lights along branches of trees and shrubs and around flower beds.

Pioneer accounts indicate that people had to be on top of their horses and rise up in the saddle to see over the tall grass of what now is downtown Salt Lake City.

[4] LDS Church tradition has it that the garden concept originated from the suggestion of a general authority who, while traveling to the Eastern United States to visit the world's fair in 1893, wanted to bring to Salt Lake City the trees he saw in the exposition.

[5] Much of the initial proposals and organization of the gardens, as well as many LDS chapels and temples in Utah, began right after the Great Depression under the supervision of Irvin T. Nelson, a valedictorian from Weber State University.

[2] Using a technique called "tossing", gardeners throw the different varieties of flower packs onto the beds in a natural flow to coordinate growth.

Designers for Temple Square gardens base their flowering patterns on the genius loci, a Roman term for spirit of place.

For example, during times of construction or excavation in downtown Salt Lake City, the patterns in the garden change based on the overall tunes of the surrounding environment, ruling out superfluous features.

"[5] Named after the action of the pistons in a car that alternate up and down, the flowers and plants are placed so as to highlight different growth cycles throughout the year.

Evans and his staff already had been designing dioramas and other materials for the Mormon pavilion at the New York World's Fair and for church visitors' centers associated with temples and historical landmarks.