Garden Lights Do It Yourself Design

Your daytime garden is of course a thing of beauty. Looking out from your house or while seated on your deck you can enjoy a riot of color, a serene Japanese landscape, or an artistic topiary depending on your taste.

But at night everything changes. Even the most beautiful garden will be wasted when the sun goes down unless you have properly installed and designed outdoor garden lighting. With proper lighting the garden reveals a whole other side. Trees look down upon manicured flower beds, a wall or path can be only partially seen, lending an air of intrigue and mystery to your garden. The sound of a carefully placed water feature can be heard chuckling in the shadows in the warm glow of colored garden lights.

If you set up the lighting in your garden properly you can also hide its less than appealing features and highlight its best ones. Garden lighting can help to divide a large complex garden into small romantic seating areas. Another great idea is to use it to highlight your outdoor wall decor. And it can take a small garden and seem to blow it up for a festive outdoor party.

Garden lighting has a functional aspect as well. Properly lit paths can guide your guests through the garden in back to the house. Both you and they will be able to safely navigate though the garden, and will not step into water features, on small plants, or into poison ivy. Many gardens include rock formations, low walls and changes in level as well. It only takes a little imagination to picture the result achieved when trying to navigate an unlighted garden with these features.

I'm sure you’ve seen pictures of beautifully designed and lit gardens in magazines such as architectural digest and Southern living. The good news is you don't have to kick out the thousands of dollars that those people paid for their beautiful outdoor space. You can create your own garden lighting that will be just as beautiful and just as functional for a fraction of the price.

You can design and install your own garden lighting using the methods and materials that I will give you in this and future articles. If you do decide to have your outdoor lighting done by professional, information here will help you to decide for yourself what kind of lighting you want, how you would like it positioned and how long it should take to install.

Let's get started!

The Effects of Lights in Your Garden

For those of us lucky enough to be fully sighted the vast majority of the information we receive through our senses comes in the form of light. But light doesn't just allow us to navigate our home without running into the fridge -- the quality and intensity of the light in our lives affects us emotionally and physically as well. We can't do anything about the light that we receive from the sun, the moon and the stars, cars on the highway or from our neighbors house. But we can control the light in our own home and in our yards and gardens.

From a safety standpoint we can use lighting to show us where entrances and exits are, to help us avoid trip-ups in the dark and to guide our eyes towards beauty. One way to accomplish both is to use lighting directed at your outdoor wall decorations and let it reflect back onto the pathway. Lighting can also affect us emotionally. Depending on the color, intensity, placement and what is being lit up, it can make us feel happy and calm or angry and upset.

Certain colors of light are associated with a feeling of coldness and remoteness, others make us feel relaxed and open and secure. We can control all of these things by designing and installing our own garden lighting system.

Whether or not people think they are being bathed in bright light - or they can barely see -is affected by many things. Depending the time of day, what kind of lighting you have in your own home and how bright other things are around you the exact same level of brightness can seem to be dim or blinding.

With all these variables in mind, it is easy to see how it might be difficult to establish a given level of brightness in the setting of your own garden. It will probably help if we try to establish a given unit of measure for brightness levels. Professionals use the term foot candles this is admittedly an archaic term but like many other technical terms its usefulness lies completely in the fact that it is a unit of measurement that is uniformly agreed upon.

For our purposes we'll call a dim light anything under half a foot candle. Here are some examples for purposes of comparison: Full moonlight is about 1/10 of a footcandle. Light on the sidewalk just below street light would be about one third of a footcandle

If you want lighting that is medium to slightly bright you would probably be looking at something in the range of 1/2 to 7 footcandles. This is enough like to move around without any danger of running into something or falling into the swimming pool. But it's still quite a bit dimmer than anything you would see inside your own home with your lights on. For sake of example most standard garden lighting systems will throw out anywhere from 2 1/2 to 6 footcandles

We call bright light anything between seven and 10 footcandles. This is the lighting inside your kitchen when you're cooking at night. Really bright light would be anything over say 30 footcandles. The lighting in most office buildings ranges between 50 and 200 footcandles, depending on the space and its use.

You are going to find that you would rarely want any of your outdoor areas to be any brighter than 18 footcandles or so. If you make your garden too bright you going to get problems with the neighbors and all of the beautiful plantings you spent so many so much time to create are going to look washed out and colorless. In addition you may be in violation of neighborhood code if your backyard looks like Yankee Stadium at night.

This is the end of our first article in the outdoor garden lighting series. I hope you found some useful information here and that you will take a look at other articles in this series. It is my intention to provide a complete manual here for the proper design and installation of outdoor lighting.