Tealight candles are small and very handy, offering some great ways of adding a bit of illumination while never taking up much space while in storage. That way, you can have many different points of light, which is useful when deploying them outside across the expanse of your garden or a significant area of it.

There are many ways you can do this and summer is often the prime time to do so; the long light evenings mean you may be outdoors until quite late in the night, but when the sun does go down the warmer weather means it won’t be so cold you all have to dash inside. Instead, you can enjoy the twilight with the light from the candles becoming increasingly prominent.

How you do this is up to each individual, but there are many possible creative ways to illuminate your garden. Indeed, the Garden Lovers Club lists no fewer than 17 ideas.

Among these are placing them in glass containers, such as upside-down wine bottles arranged like chandeliers, casting their light from an elevated position. Another is to suspend them in jam jars.

You could try floating them in water on your bird bath to provide one intense focal point, or even locating them in unused plant pots, which enables you to spread them out more.

With Midsummer having now passed, the nights will gradually start to lengthen again, so these lights could be increasingly useful as summer wears on. But they may also be very handy in Autumn; after all, what could be more atmospheric than the flaming light of a tea light emerging through the spooky eyes and mouth cut out of a Halloween pumpkin?

With their small size and the fact they can be used alone or in number, the many ways in which you can use tea lights to add atmosphere and illumination in your garden mean they are wonderfully handy things to have. There is no better time to get them than now, as the nights start to draw in.