VEVOR Faux Norfolk Pine Garland, 9 ft Artificial Christmas Greenery

Description

Nine feet of unlit greenery you can shape

Most Christmas garland sold now arrives pre-lit, which decides two things for you: where the battery box ends up and what colour the lights are. This VEVOR garland is plain greenery. It carries no lights and no cable, which makes it the piece to buy when you want to run your own lighting, or when you want greenery in a spot where a switched decoration would be a nuisance.

The foliage

It is modelled on Norfolk pine rather than a generic fir, which gives it a softer, more feathered needle and a fuller silhouette than the flat spiky moulding used on cheap garland. Nine feet is the standard length for a mantel, a door frame or a single flight of stair rail.

Construction

PE foliage over a metal wire core. The wire is what makes this worth the money. It holds whatever shape you bend it into, so you can swag it between two fixings, wrap it around a post, or lay it flat along a mantel and have it stay put without pins every six inches. Garland without an internal wire sags into a straight line and cannot be corrected.

Outdoors

The material is waterproof, fade resistant and corrosion resistant, and the wire core is what stops it losing shape after rain. It is a reasonable choice for a door frame, a porch or a railing exposed to weather for a season.

Adding lights

If you want it lit, wind a fairy light strand through the centre of the garland rather than across the surface, so the wire disappears into the foliage and the light glows out from inside. A battery strand keeps it cable free; a plug in strand will be brighter and will not need changing halfway through the month.

Handling

Open the branches out in all directions when it arrives, including downward, because garland that has only been fluffed upward looks flat from below, which is how a mantel garland is usually seen. Store it loosely coiled, never folded.