Paul Busse, Master Designer of a Whimsical, Shrunken New York City Paul Busse has designed the intricate structures for the New York Botanical Garden's Holiday Train Show since it was created two decades ago, including a copy of the Manhattan Bridge. Paul Busse moved purposefully from St. Patrick's Cathedral to the Guggenheim Museum, to City Hall to the New York Public Library. He made sure that the ferns and ivy were framing the facades just so, that the cinnamon-stick lintels and acorn-cap finials were secure, that the trains were running smoothly. Mr. Busse is the master builder behind a Lilliput-scale village of New York City landmarks rendered in birch bark, lotus pods, beech nuts and kumquat slices. For two decades, the whimsical monuments, mansions and bridges, interspersed with model trains, have drawn tens of thousands of visitors annually to the New York Botanical Garden's Holiday Train Show. But these days, Mr. Busse, who lives in Kentucky, is moving a little more carefully, directing his staff with a voice gone even softer. Seven years ago, he learned he had Parkinson's disease, and at 63, with his hands increasingly rigid, he must delegate responsibility to the artisans who have helped him create this and other railway garden exhibits across the country. "I've always been a hands-on person, and I hate giving it up," Mr. Busse said last week in barely a whisper as he oversaw the installation of the show in the garden's Enid A. Haupt Conservatory in the Bronx, as he does every November. He no longer builds models himself or puts the intricate structures in their landscape. He moves in a rapid shuffle, but sometimes lacks balance - he looked as though he might fall a few times during a conversation at the garden. Still, he said, "I feel like I've multiplied my hands by 25, and it's been a joy seeing what wonderful miracles I get." If Mr. Busse sounds as if he stepped out of a Frank Capra movie, it may be because he managed to turn a childhood passion for trains and the natural world into a successful career, albeit in a field - he calls it "mechanical botanicals" - that all but defines "niche." The botanical garden first approached him about designing a holiday train show in 1992. Mr. Busse made a sample to demonstrate what he could do, a model of the Poe Cottage, circa 1812, and the job was his. Over the years, he has built 140 structures for the garden's collection, ranging from an eight-inch-high town house to a 14-foot-tall reproduction of the Brooklyn Bridge. This year, Mr. Busse and his team, which includes his son, Brian, and his nephew Jason, will install a dozen holiday exhibits across the country, including at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia and the Chicago Botanic Garden. As his health declines, he makes fewer of the trips himself. But the Bronx exerts a special pull. "To me," he said, "the New York Botanical Garden is sort of the zenith of gardens in this country." The partnership has been equally fruitful for the garden. Last year, the exhibit attracted 216,000 people. It has become a quintessential New York holiday tradition, on a par with the Rockefeller Center tree and the store windows on Fifth Avenue, especially for parents who cannot resist mixing an architecture lesson with the simple thrill of watching train cars zip past Christmas cactus. "Now our collection is so big that we can lay away buildings and give them a couple years off," said Todd Forrest, the garden's vice president for horticulture and living collections. "Every year Paul reconfigures things and I go in there and say, "This really feels different." He's kind of brilliant at changing the scale and moving the taller buildings around. Mr. Busse toils out of a 4,500-square-foot workshop about 100 feet from his house, on 12 acres in Alexandria, Ky. His company, Applied Imagination, employs 15 artists and technicians year round and hires extra help for the holidays. He fell under the spell of miniature locomotives as a child, when his parents built model train sets, he swears, for their pleasure, not his. He said his father was "something of an electronics genius" and his mother a nationally recognized weaver. His first inkling that anything was wrong with his health came when his thumb started to twitch, in 2004. Parkinson's was diagnosed the next year, and he has followed an alternative program of therapy that does not use medications. While Mr. Busse took his family sightseeing during previous installations, he has not laid eyes on all of the buildings he has so meticulously recreated. Many peripatetic New Yorkers have not either, since they include lesser-known structures in the city and the region, like the Hendrick I. Lott House in Brooklyn and the Bedford Hills train station in Westchester County.