And then there was light…

The garden lighting – which we planned into the build and had help from a lighting designer with – has given the garden a whole new dimension. Lighting is one of those things that really needs a professional eye, I think, because it’s about achieving a certain intangible feeling as much as a visual effect. When we first spoke to the designer about the lighting we were using abstract words like ‘magical’ and ‘ethereal’ without any real notion of what that meant in terms of hardware. We just knew we didn’t want the garden to look like an airport runway.

I discovered quite quickly that there isn’t a wealth of garden lighting inspiration on Pinterest or Instagram - we kept seeing the same images and none of them quite reflected our taste. So we really relied on the designer to make suggestions and then the final decisions required a bit of a leap of faith.

I am really pleased with the results. Although we have a lot of lights they’re all pleasingly subtle and warm-toned. We’ve got uplighters on the trees and the feature brick wall of the seating area, ground-level washes across the steps, tiny down lights along the paths and raised beds, and a ceiling of twinkly fairy lights above the fire. The most expensive lights are tiny ‘firefly’ dots on the end of bendable wire branches hidden amongst the foliage in one of the borders. I think these will look especially good in winter, but at the moment they’re making the leaves of the surrounding plants glow in the dark. Sitting in the garden at night, the whole effect is indeed magical - and it looks lovely from inside the house too.