10 of the Best Garden Lighting Ideas for your Outdoor Space

I recently wrote about the best Boho Style Garden Furniture and Accessories and got such a good response to it, I thought I’d write about my other favourite thing, garden lighting!

The most coveted item in the garden at the moment (apart from DIY pallet sofas with a scantily dressed Tom Hardy draped over them), seems to be festoon lights.

I always get asked so many questions about my festoon lights and where I get them from.

Here are the best garden lighting ideas for a cosy outdoor space. 

Best Garden Lighting

Even though summer is hurtling towards its end, I think garden lighting comes into its own when we approach the late summer and early autumn months.

The nights are getting darker and it’s time to cosy up, lights for your garden are the perfect addition. 

Now is also a great time to purchase garden lighting. A lot of companies are reducing their prices and having big sales after the mad rush for garden items in March, April and May.

You want lighting that will give your garden a soft glow and will look just as good in daylight as they do at night. 

Before we designed our garden and included garden lighting, I would rarely sit out there once the sun started setting.

There’s no fun trying to talk to someone only to realise that they actually went indoors half an hour ago and you’ve been sitting talking to the stand-alone olive tree opposite you with a gin in your hand.

Here are some of the best ways you can create a fabulous ambient space when it gets dark.

Festoon Lights

I wrote a dedicated blog post about festoon lights as they are THE accessory to have in the garden.

They light up your garden wonderfully and look just as good during the day as they do at night. They are the best garden lighting for your outdoor space. 

Read more >>>

The Best Way to Use Festoon Lights in Your Garden

Last of the Summer Homewares. My Favourite Late Summer Buys

Festoon lights have seen a huge surge in popularity over the last couple of years as we’ve used our gardens more.

Festoon lights make brilliant lights for pergolas, but if you don’t have a pergola, don’t worry! You can easily hang them from trees or your house and even drape them under a garden parasol. 

Fairy Lights

Now an integral part of an interior Instagrammers home (and yes, I have been guilty of putting them in my bathroom), fairy lights are slowly making their way out into the garden.

There are so many outdoor fairy lights to choose from these days and they are readily available in battery, mains powered or solar.

Lights4fun has a fabulous range, you can wrap them pretty much around anything including your trees, bushes or parasols. You can even get dedicated garden lights for pergolas!

We have used them to make our neighbour’s wall look a little less ugly until we can put our new pergola and slatted fence up!

Net Lights

Basically fairy lights but on a net! The perfect garden lighting if you want to brighten up those often dark corners of your garden like hedges and bushes.

Bushes deserve a little bit of the fairy light treatment too!

Candles

Probably one of the most obvious choices when it comes to garden lighting, I love how candles give off a soft romantic glow.

There are so many to choose from now and you can get weird and wonderful aromas like freshly picked dandelion leaf and turmeric (I’m sure it’s out there somewhere).

We’ve all probably got several hundred candles lurking in the house, so this is the easiest and cheapest way to add lighting to your garden.

There are also plenty of LED candles to choose from as well which will, for obvious reasons, not give off a scent.

However, they will keep glowing even when that gust of wind decides to invade your garden space (although depending on what type of wind, will not mask the smell!) and provide that little bit of romantic garden lighting to your patio or courtyard. 

Solar Lanterns

If you still want to use traditional candles in your garden but find that they are continuously blowing out, why not invest in some lanterns?

They’re fabulous at protecting your delicate little candle but again, make a wonderful feature in your garden.

There are plenty of lanterns with solar or battery-powered candles in them, perfect for your garden if it’s always that little bit windy!

Solar lanterns look just as good in the day as they do when they’re all lit up and showy offy at night!

Hang them up from your trees or festoon lights and they will turn themselves on for around 6 hours once it gets dark.

A perfect boho garden. Image credit: marzena.marideko

Firepits for the garden

Everyone seems to want a firepit for the garden lately.

A fire pit obviously serves a double purpose of providing garden lighting and warming you up whilst you toast your marshmallows. Or toes.

Just don’t do what we did and put the fire pit directly on top of your decking for one of your friends to shout half an hour later that there appears to be a red glow coming from the decking.

Also, do not light your fire pit when you have consumed quite a bit of gin! 🙂

Starburst Lights

Create a fabulous burst of garden lighting along your pathway or around your garden perimeter or fence with starburst lights.

Again, you can get these either battery-powered or solar and they often come on stakes which you can put straight into the ground.

They can blend quite easily between your plants during the day which will stop your garden from looking like the lead-up to Santa’s grotto, but provide a subtle sparkling effect at night.

Rope Lights

I think one of the first garden images I pinned on Pinterest included rope lights. I love how you can pretty much bend them around anything in the garden and because they’re quite subtle, they provide a magical glow.

I particularly like the idea of winding them around flower borders or pathways, providing that little bit of garden lighting to appreciate your plants in the evening. 

Stake Lights

My mum was probably the first person who really got me into gardening.

Every time she came to visit, she would pop to the nearest garden centre and buy some plants which I would inevitably kill.

I always remember her garden being immaculate and she’s had stake lights and garden lighting for as long as I can remember.

Stake lights are another fantastic way to provide garden lighting in the evening. If you place them strategically, you can really make the plants and colours of the flowers glow.

Neon Lights

And finally, if you really want to add a funky addition to your garden (sorry, did I just say funky? I’m 40 for goodness sake haha), and want to go all Love Island in your garden, get an outdoor event neon light in your garden.

They are a contemporary take on lights for your garden

Light up a corner of your patio, hang it on your garden shed or if you’ve gone all out in your garden and added a bar, get that cocktail sign up!

Neon Beach has a fantastic range of products and can waterproof your sign to use outdoors.

The perfect way to add a bit of fun garden lighting to your outdoor space!

So there you have it, the best garden lighting for any garden, big or small.

There is no reason not to light up your garden and all your hard gardening work at night now! I’m off to enjoy a G&T in mine before the rain comes in tonight.

Next blog post, how to keep dry in the garden! 🙂

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