Make Magic: Put String Lights In The Garden

Inexpensive string lights in the garden make it feel magical, inviting and fun.

Cheap + Beautiful | Many of the clients in my residential landscape design practice can afford whatever kind of outdoor lighting they want, so it surprised— and delighted— me a few years ago when one of them suggested we find places to put white string lights in her large and rambling garden. “I love the way they look and the kind of feeling they bring to a garden,” she told me, rattling off a list of “happy, fun” string light sightings that included weddings outside, hill towns in Europe, those blocked-off laneways with shops and bistros in San Francisco.

My client may have been a romantic, but she was definitely on to something. Of all the ways to light a garden—up-lighting, down-lighting, moonlighting, etc.—few methods can match humble, cheap low-voltage white string lights for creating a genuine feeling of enchantment.

Some of the charm of white bare-bulb string lights (and I do mean the white ones only, with one exception: those chubby, widely spaced coloured lights you see in movies such as Mamma Mia) comes from their old school look, and some of it comes from the way they just naturally suggest unpretentious kinds of fun. Then there’s the magic they make when they take on and project the shape of whatever thing they’re attached to, like the branches of the trees pictured here.

String Lights Go To The Movies

Want ideas for how to use string lights in clever ways? Look no further than the movies. They’re replete with string light scenes. I’ll bet you can picture of lots of them if you stop and think for a minute. One of my favourite is the string light swags in the dreamy town square dance scene in Big Fish.

Rachel Getting Married is  my wife’s favourite string lights movie. She loves the effect in the final scenes so much she has asked me to replicate it for our garden; I don’t think it will be difficult or expensive to do. The lights can be seen clearly the morning after the wedding. In these scenes you can tell string lights have been attached to poles and used to create an undulating, irregular necklace (CLICK on the screenshot here so you can actually see them). “I think this lighting scheme looks fantastic,” she told me, “and it’s portable too, so we can change up its location—or take it down for a while—if we want.”

One of the best things about string lights is that they are plug and play. You do need a outlet though, so if you think you might want to make good use of them in your garden,  install a few outlets at random spots so you won’t be running extension cords everywhere, which will definitely detract from the ambiance.—Ron Rule

Ron Rule is a well-known residential garden designer in Vancouver. He is the founder and head of the Certificate In Garden Design program at the University of B.C.

Photos: iStock