Let your evenings glow How to light up your garden at night

TAKE YOUR GARDEN FROM DAY TO NIGHT WITH CLEVER LIGHTS

1 GHOSTLY, BUT VERY FRIENDLY

Give your hydrangeas a fresh glow when the flowers have finished and light up your birch trees from below to show off their beautiful, ghostly white trunks.

Your Christmas fairy lights are still sparkling in your garden and you are spending balmy evenings outside. So it’s the ideal time to think about your outdoor space and how different it can look in the night once you replace the fairy lights with well-positioned glow points. You will see your garden in a whole new light!

2 Long for a leggy look

Direct your lights upwards in a grove of bamboo after the foliage has been trimmed back and highlight the colour and texture of the culms.

3 Round of applause

Turn the spotlight on your fan palm to accentuate its neat pleats and make it a unique, living, designer lampshade. Posh without the price tag!

4 chameleon changes

Spotlights on the floor can intensify angles and colours, and play with light and shadows. What in the daytime is green and brown is at night green, yellow, brown and purple. And such a clash of colours never looked so interesting!

What you can do

• Create evening ambience in your outdoor area instead of it just being an extension of indoors.

• Make your garden journey safe by putting small bollards along pathways and strip lighting or spotlights on steps.

• Highlight water features, garden artwork or the silhouette of a tree.

• Put spotlights in shrubs to make them glow or behind shrubs for a ghosting effect.

• Cast interesting shadows of slender plants along walls.