If there is one thing that people agree on in midwinter, it is an urge to celebrate. The Romans expressed this with Saturnalia, a week-long festival of authorised bad behaviour, leading up to the shortest day of the year. For gifts, revellers exchanged light, in the form of tapered candles. With the approach of the Winter Solstice and the sun’s slow return, we too naturally turn to fire – in the grate, on a pudding, in the flames of many candles. It’s also the time to fiddle with LED boxes and fibre optic systems.

With parties cancelled, you can still have the righteous pleasure of an outdoor spectacle, and its possibilities are endless. Lighting artists come from all over the world to display their skills at London’s Christmas at Kew, (4 December-17 January 2021), and they are available for commission. For the entertainment of you and your few guests, and possibly neighbours, a takeaway from Kew might involve singing roses – real rose bushes lit with LED rosebuds, that glow in time to music.

Or you might translate spectacular light projections at the Temperate House onto your own outbuilding, or at least use uplighters to emphasise the ironwork of a glasshouse. The simplest effects at Kew are sometimes the most pleasing: a venerable tree wrapped in hundreds of metres of warm pea lights, or small jets of flame lining either side of a path, or making patterns in the grass.

Adam Thow, Kew’s Head of Commercial Activities, is an alumnus of the Sir John Soane’s Museum and his ideas about home lighting err towards the gothic: ‘Dual spotlighting around statues or fountains abstracts the shadows,” he suggests. “Gentle, low-voltage silhouetting from behind structural plants gives a slightly spooky glow, and a different atmosphere to bright pea lights or uplighters.”

Lighting up a larger garden or estate can be conceived as a journey, with a calm introduction involving warm white lights (music optional) before arriving at, say, a favourite tree, shimmering in rich tones. “Uplighters are an easy thing to do; you could have them programmed around your garden,” says Adam. “Have them pure white during the year, and then change the light settings to go a bit wilder.”

This view is shared by Sally Storey, creative director of John Cullen Lighting, and the acknowledged queen of lights. Good lighting brings glamour to a house and its immediate garden at any time of year, and it is wise to think about getting the electrics to the right place when the builders are in. Storey suggests that it’s quite simple to create a festive mood, by adding to the lighting system that you already have. “I prefer subtlety, but if a fountain has been lit with fibre optics, it’s very easy to introduce an element of colour for an occasion.”

“I light my entrance with spike lights, from two pots on either side of the door,” says Storey. “The light filters through the foliage and up the façade of the building. It gives a very soft background light, which you can add to. At Christmas I might put warm fairy lights in the box hedges on either side. It’s immediately more festive because the house is already lit from behind.” Link these gentle lights to a sensor system, instead of a glaring search light.

Lighting is useful in extending one’s perception of space; a Christmas tree placed just outside a plate glass door could be smothered in white lights. “If you’ve lit something immediately outside the glass, your eye goes beyond,” says Storey. This could be as simple as filling a small courtyard with at least a dozen candle-lit lanterns, or putting a couple on each step. “If you aren’t going to see people, you want to light things immediately outside your house, so that you enjoy feeling festive, even in a smaller group.”

After Christmas there is a change of mood, although the focus remains on light and fire. Multi-sensory design studio Bompas and Parr is looking ahead: “We are currently obsessed with making entire volcanoes in gardens and then setting off faux eruptions,” says Sam Bompas. “If ordered soon, we can deliver in time for a New Year’s Eve volcanic eruption, where all the fireworks are set off at once.” Enquiries should be directed to Bompas and Parr.

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