3 ways I'm lighting to my garden without getting the electrician in – easy solutions to add atmosphere to summer evenings
My plans to get the perfect garden glow
Interior designer and content creator Rebecca Constable is one of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on demystifying the process of designing and decorating a home, and helping people work out where to spend and where to save.
We’re quickly heading into garden hosting season and even though the days are long we often find ourselves sitting in the garden in the dark because we haven’t got any proper lighting outside.
By the time we had finished our house renovation there was very little money left to spend on the garden, and to be honest drawing up a garden lighting plan was the last thing on my mind.
Our architect did persuade us to put in some wired lighting but I didn’t think it through properly and it's very sparse. What's more, now that the London foxes have had their fun, a number of the cables have been chewed and the lights no longer work.
However, this summer I am determined to take a more considered approach to our lighting outside and so I have been on a mission to work out how I can light our garden without calling in an electrician and digging up the paving!
Much like the rooms in our homes, I think lighting can make or break a garden (after dark). Great lighting really does make the garden an extra room that you can use all day and all evening, weather permitting. And when it’s December, snowy and dark at 4pm, beautiful lighting in a garden is much nicer to look out onto rather than a big dark abyss.
I am going to take a similar approach to how I light any of the other rooms in our home and focus on adding layered lighting, which means that the light doesn’t all come from one source or one level, but from a number of different places, making the space feel warm and inviting.
Firstly I’m going to put in some uplighters throughout the flower beds and in some of my larger flower pots. These are going to provide a lovely wash of light over the shrubbery, highlighting certain plants and trees.
I have found these handy solar lights from Amazon which you can simply stick into the soil and let the sun charge them during the day. They automatically switch on when it's dark and stay on for a set number of hours, which means once you’ve put them in place you don’t have to think about them again.
I like the drama these add and I think they look just as good as any fancy wired in uplighter.
Secondly I’m going to add some mid-level lighting with festoon lights. I’m planning to hang these along the back of our garden fence, between our two birch trees.
These are really just going to be for mood lighting and drawing the eye to the back of the garden. I love festoon lights because in summer they give off a fun carnival type vibe but in the winter they feel festive and christmassy.
We do have outdoor sockets in our garden so I could either get some plug in ones from John Lewis and run an extension cable along the flowerbed or I’ve found some great solar powered festoon lights from Garden Trading, which would be a simpler set up.
With festoon lights I’m looking for the ones that look a bit like the old-fashioned bulbs that have a filament, and I definitely want them to be a warm white.
Finally I am going to add some table lights and lanterns to the areas we usually end up sitting, like our garden table and the wall between the patio and the lawn. These will be partly for practical reasons so we can see what we’re doing, but also to add more ambience to those spaces.
A really lo-fi option would be to add a lantern with a candle and Corston have just launched one that I love and reminds me of a ship's lantern. There is something so special about the flicker of a real flame that you just can’t beat.
Or alternatively I could add some rechargeable table lights for something a little more powerful. Tala has a great table lamp that is designed for outdoors and comes in a range of gorgeous colours. I love the little handle on the top as it will be easy to move it to wherever we want it in the garden.
My hope is that if we can add some additional lighting in the garden it’ll increase the chances of us spending more time out there this summer and even into autumn as it gets cooler.
And if I really want the garden to feel like an extension of the rest of the house then I probably need a better lighting strategy than relying on the big light, also known as the moon.
