Evening Lights

Our patio table is away from the house next to the wall of vine covered fence. In the evening it's dark there. We have outside wall sconces on the house that give off a lovely warm light, but they don't project enough light out toward the table. And that fence of green looms awfully dark at night.

We need some lights by the table for the late evenings when we linger there. Nothing bright, just enough glow to dispel the gloom. And they should be solar powered; I didn't want to run an electric wire across the stones.

A string of solar party lights draped on the fence? 

No. Too "wedding venue", and the vine on that fence is over a foot thick, so stringing the lights would mean putting up extension brackets to jut out away from the vine to hold the lights. A whole string of lights needed a separate solar panel mounted nearby and it all was too much.

A single solar lantern on a shepherd's crook seemed easy. It's an open squirrel cage with a filament bulb and because of its open design it can't really be seen from inside, it blends into the shrubbery.

It's bright, at least in one tiny spot. It works, I guess.

Plastic filigree solar path lights mingled among the shrubs at the foot of the fence add a little more light at our feet. The shrubs (amsonias) will fill in some day and hide the cylinders, but for now, while waiting for them to grow, I have these lights interspersed among the plants. They're staked in the ground close together but give off just a little bit of light.

We got the filigree path lights to replace the mushroom style solar lights that were here flanking the narrow front walk when we bought the house. Most of those had stopped working. But the filigree cylinders flanking the path were a problem.

If you stepped off the walk you knocked them over, the hose did the same, and the lights near the street were targets for the newspaper delivery guy. He knocked a light over every week, apparently aiming at them. So the path lights have been relegated to the back garden.

But we still need to illuminate a shallow step on the walk that trips visitors (and tripped me one winter. I bounced and my phone crashed; its screen did not survive that mishap.) I have to find a small solar spotlight for that. That step is murderous.

At least our patio table isn't lost in the gloom any more. The solar lights work well enough there. But the best light for sitting outside on a late August night is right up there in the sky:

Don't you think?