Last Updated on July 8, 2022 by Marco C.
Decorative lights for plants can add new aspects to the beauty of your plantings. Lighting can add mystery and interest to your plant world. Read more to find out how to weave decorative lights into your garden in such a way that they look beautiful and work nicely as well.
Types Of Lights For Plants
You get lights designed to help plants grow, and lights designed to give lighting effects. More often than not, these are not the same lights. In other words, wrapping fairy lights around your fern in a dark corner will probably do little to make it grow more! Using a grow light on the other hand will provide light of a frequency and intensity that helps the plant grow.
In this article, we are going to look at decorative lights. These are lights that are not always specifically designed to provide any light for growth – just light for decoration.
Decorative Lights For Plants
The recent rapid advances in micro-electronic technology, together with these technologies maturing and becoming inexpensive – have spawned a big boom in a range of beautiful offerings that we can use to make our gardens and plants more stunning. Let’s have a look at a few different types we can use.
Fairy Or Strip Lights
I tend to be quite conservative with electricity. If you have a choice to buy something that is rated for outdoor use but choose to use it indoors, this is not a bad thing! Waterproofing is always good when it comes to doing things near plants given their fondness for water.
When I was doing some consulting in Zambia, my friend Dan’s daughter arrived from Canada with a box of these fairy strip lights for him as a gift. His tropical garden has these huge beautiful trees and they wove the lights all over the trees. At this point, Zambia was being plagued by power cuts and it was amazing the one evening when the entire region was in darkness, and these solar-powered fairy lights provided four glowing trees in the dark forests of Africa!
Learn more about: How To Choose 30-Lumen Solar Path Lights
When you uncoil these lights be quite careful – the wires are fragile and not able to survive rough handling. You need to position the solar charger unit in an area where it will get the best sunlight to charge the batteries. I have seen many people optimistically hope that solar chargers can help charge in the shade – this just does not happen. A solar panel needs direct sunlight in order to charge.
There are a number of reasons to buy a solar-powered unit – firstly, it makes the whole thing easy to use as you do not need to worry about having access to a power socket. Secondly, the fact that you are not using a power socket means that there is no mains voltage around – dogs, cats, kids, and so on are always a hazard with outdoor cables. If the cable has a little bit of current from a solar-powered battery, there is no risk to human life if the cable gets cut. This is not the case for mains voltage from a socket.
Decorative Solar-charged Spotlights
When it comes to decorative lights for plants I love solar-charged spotlights. They do not work in my garden as it just does not get enough light. I have tried a few of them and they work well for a few days and then fade away. However, in various of my friend’s gardens, these lights are amazing! They need to get a few hours of direct sunlight to be able to recharge in any meaningful way.
The trick with choosing these sorts of lights is to find a light that has an adjustable panel – this means you can point the light where you want it, and also adjust the panel so it points towards the Sun. This gives you a lot more flexibility than the units with a panel fixed into the unit offers. As an example, this means you can place the lights on both sides of a path and orient the panels to get the best sunlight. If the unit had fixed panels you would find the lights on one side of the path may charge well, but on the other side of the path not as well.
Decorative Innovative/Artistic/Trippy Lights
In this category, the sky is basically now the limit in terms of what you can buy to add interest to your garden, or pot plants. You can go with a relatively simple, but cute item such as this (I used to walk past one of these just down the road from me until recently when it appears to have suffered an untimely end due to cows). The watering can motif lit up at night just looks beautiful!
I am a beekeeper so for me, anything that has a bee in it wins the prize. This particular string of bees is now on my birthday list and I have e-mailed it to my nearest and dearest as a subtle hint in case anybody forgets my birthday in November.
I have a friend who does a bit of consulting in the magic mushroom industry and he has these beautiful mushroom lights planted in his garden. We can always use a bit of mycology in our gardens – even if it is fake!! I know this is an article on decorative lights for plants – but plants form a natural symbiosis with mushrooms, so what better decorative light than a mushroom light!
The above highlights just a few decorative lights for plants, but if you browse, you can find the decorative lights for plants that resonate with you!
I hope this article has helped you see how you can use decorative lights for plants to bring beauty and mystery to your garden. Remember the bit about the solar panels that you can direct to sunlight – these things really need to get 4-8 hours of direct sunlight in order to work. Many people end up making a mistake here. If you make that mistake, you end up with e-waste. If you enjoyed this link please share.
Read more about: An In-depth Look At Indoor Plant Lights Decorative
FAQs
What lighting is best for plants?
Plants do best under natural Sunlight. If you cannot get enough of this, you can choose between energy inefficient and energy efficient lighting. I tend to encourage the second option, and hence LED lighting, if it is designed for lighting plants, is the best choice. It is cool, energy efficient and relatively cost effective.
Are LED lights good for growing plants?
Yes. For many years the dominant lights in growing operations were not LED lights, but as the technology matures this is changing. LED lights produce a very high yield of light per unit of electricity consumer. Other lights convert more electricity to heat. This means that LED lights are economically advantageous. Naturally, these are not any old LED light, but are specialist LED lights made specifically for growing plants.
Can you put string lights on plants?
Yes you can. Many decorative light strips are specially designed for this purpose. Ideally buy waterproof lights with solar chargers (if they will be somewhere where they can get sunlight during the day).
Do LED strip lights help plants grow?
It will depend on what type they are. If you buy "strip grow lights" they are lights made to provide supplemental lighting to help plants grow. If you buy strip decorative lights these probably will produce insufficient light to make any difference to our plants.
Dr. Garth A. Cambray is a Canadian/South African entrepreneur and beekeeper with 28 years of experience in apiculture and specializes in adding value to honey. His Ph.D. research developed a new advanced continuous fermentation method for making mead that has resulted in a number of companies globally being able to access markets for mead. His company, Makana Meadery, exports honey mead to the USA where it is available to discerning connoisseurs. He has also developed technologies to commercially manufacture organic honey vinegar in Zambia for export globally. He holds a few patents globally in the ethanol industry and believes in technology and knowledge transfer for human development and environmental sustainability. One of his proudest achievements is the fact that the wind farm he started at one of his old apiary sites has essentially made his hometown carbon neutral.
