Getting Your Garden Festive for Under £50

For some of us, Christmas really begins when the outdoor lights come out. While indoors is for tasteful themes, scented candles and beautifully decked Christmas trees, we love outside decorations that are colourful, supersized and fun.

We’ll run through some of outdoor Christmas decoration ideas that could inspire you and your garden this festive season. You’ll need a ladder, some warm clothes and a bit of assistance – but you’ll be the toast of your family once you assemble them all out on the lawn in the evening for the switch on.

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Porch

The porch is the focal point for anyone approaching your home, so it is good to concentrate your efforts on this area. We love attaching boughs, soft glow lights and garlands to the porch frame. 

Interspersing the greenery with oversized baubles (a cheap way of doing this is with large plastic balls – like a gym ball – a small silver bucket and some aquarium glue) looks really striking and cannot fail to raise a smile from passersby.

Mini Christmas trees placed either side of the door look really effective. And of course, you cannot miss out a beautifully decorated wreath on the front door.

(http://onekindesign.com)

 

Lights

Lights are the main affair when it comes to decorating the garden and outside area. You can go minimal with an accent tree or by just concentrating on the windows of the ground floor, but if you put in the leg (and arm!) work, a lit-up garden can look breathtaking.

Festoon lighting can look magical draped from tree to tree and icicle lighting is perfect draped around the fascias and windows of the home.

Children really respond to rope lights and 3D Christmas lights. There’s so much variety on the market, but we really love the traditional sleighs, choo-choo trains and Christmas characters available. 

With all exterior Christmas lights, your hard work won’t be rewarded until evening sets in – but the wait will be worth it.

 

Trees

If you’re decorating outdoor trees, we prefer the “more is more” school of thinking. If you only have a limited run of lights – use them elsewhere. Trees need a lot of coverage.

We find net lighting works best for trees as it gives the best, even spread of lighting.

If you have a collection of trees in close proximity, we love draping strands of fairy lights from tree to tree. These can be punctuated with LED wire stars.

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We’ve seen some really good solar-powered lights come on the market in recent years, which saves messing around with power supplies and leads. Plus, it is also cost effective and works out cheaper. 

We also saw some amazing trunk wrapping last Christmas. Just concentrating on the trunk and bare branches with strings of lights looks really effective.

 

Garden

For front and back gardens, think outside the box. Huge pretend lollipops, giant fake presents and oversized candy canes are just some of the in-your-face garden decorations we’ve seen. And the best thing is that these can be done in-house. If you’re of a creative-bent, these can be knocked up on a cold Saturday afternoon. But if you’d rather leave it to the professionals, there’s some amazing larger-than-life outdoor Christmas decorations available in B&M garden centres across the UK.

 http://pinklover.snydle.com

We're really looking forward to getting the outdoor decorations from the loft and sorting our homes for Christmas. And now we've been inspired by these pictures, it looks like we'll be heading to the shops to add to our Christmas decoration supplies!

We'd love to see how you get on too - share your Christmas home and garden pictures with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

 

Main image courtesy of https://www.u2j.org/