Margarete Johnson loves to garden. She loves it so much, in fact, she can’t keep her hands out of her garden — even during the cold winter months.

But her hobby takes a different turn this time of year. While other holiday enthusiasts are busy climbing ladders and braving steep roofs to line their homes with Christmas lights, Johnson is busy carefully wrapping found objects with uniquely colored bulbs to create a glowing garden.

Johnson’s sparkling “plants” were inspired by a trip to the Bellevue Botanical Garden in Seattle.

“We have friends in Seattle, and at Christmastime in the year 2000 we went to the botanical gardens. It was amazingly beautiful,” she recalls. “They had arbors with purple wisteria and beds upon beds of flowers all made out of lights.

“The next day I ran out to the local hardware store, bought a bunch of lights and created a bouquet for my friend to put on her patio table.”

Once the seed was planted, ideas just kept sprouting. Johnson has been crafting gardens made of lights ever since.

This year, her plot consists of myriad delphiniums, muscari and cardinal flowers. Flowers from her imagination occupy her garden as well. She uses wooden dowels, Styrofoam balls, black electrical tape and, of course, lights to create her dream blooms. Each flower takes about 100 lights. The most difficult part of the process, Johnson says, is finding unique colors such as oranges, purples and pinks.

Margarete Johnson coiled holiday lights to mimic the look of flowers in her front yard.

“Growing up in Germany, I didn’t have Christmas lights, and when we did they were always white,” she says. “So really the true joy and fun of it is in creating the plants.”

And anyone can do it, she assures.

Margarete Johnson has transformed her flower bed into a hodgepodge of holiday lights shaped to mimic flowers. Johnson is pictured last Thursday outside her home in southwest Lawrence.

“Use your imagination and keep wrapping,” she says. “It takes many extension cords, and the key to making it look really pretty is to cover all the connections.”

Johnson, who won the 2004 Extension Master Gardener of the Year Award, attributes much of her fascination with gardening to her aunt.

“My mother’s sister was very much into gardening, and she and I would putter around her garden and I would learn about the various plants,” she says.

“I remember one summer she put a bottle around a branch on her pear tree, and by the end of the summer a pear had grown in the bottle. She then clipped off the branch, bottle and all, and made pear schnapps.”

Possibly one of the most attractive features of Johnson’s glowing garden is how easy it is to dismantle at the end of the season.

“They are individual units, so they are easy to store away,” she says. “And then next year I set it up as a completely new and different garden.”

So what’s in the works for next year?

Johnson replies with a shrug, “My husband wants me to make a wisteria arbor. We’ll see.”