Planning Your Garden Lights

It's one thing to plan your garden itself. The space you have set aside for your plantings is what it is. It has a particular size and shape. The plants that you choose also have their own size and shape of color in the growing cycle. So those are done.

Your garden lights are a little different. There is no other aspect of your garden is going to change so rapidly and every single day like the lighting will. If you'll follow me on this quick journey through basic design principles and ideas, I think that by the time you reach the end of the series you'll be completely comfortable designing your own garden lighting. And if you have a professional do it you'll be able to provide knowledgeable and pertinent input.

The first thing that you want to do is to take a look at the light that you already have -- sunlight. Take a look at it every 60 to 90 minutes throughout the course of the day and see how light of different colors and from different angles works with your plantings. If you have a water feature, look at what is reflected in the water. Is this something you would like to accentuate, or eliminate in your nighttime garden?

Because the Night Belongs to Clovers...

You'll also want to take a look at your garden at night. At this point, you may be laughing at me. Nevertheless, it is important to understand how much of an effect ambient moonlight is going to have on the appearance of your garden before you go about installing artificial light.

Whatever lighting you install has to be positioned, colored and of proper intensity to work with natural light or the effect that you achieve will be harsh and artificial instead of beautiful and enhancing.

A lot of caution should be used here. Try not to make the single most common mistake that people do concerning outdoor lighting. More is definitely not better here. Just a little bit of properly placed and formatted lighting is infinitely better than a lot of poorly thought out illumination.

You want to create an effect, a sense of place that enhances all the hard work that you put into your plantings, water features and statuary. Simple floodlights glaring down from above will not do that for you.

Scaling Your Garden Walls

Remember also the effects of scale. If you're trying to light up a garden of 400 ft.², that's quite a different thing from lighting up a football field. Rule of thumb is the smaller the garden, the smaller the fixtures and the lower total wattage. This may sound like common sense, but I have seen plenty of small gardens in backyards lit up with a phalanx of huge spotlights mounted on a bar across the roof of a home. The effect is that of an amateur sports event, and not relaxing or pleasing to the eye at all.

Taken to consideration how your garden reacts to light. No, I don't mean the fact that you plants simply die without it! I mean stop and think about the way that your garden structural features like statuary walls paths and water features react to light. How do they look when brightly lit? What about the foliage? Is it very reflective? If your garden is predominately water features and shiny leaf plants, that is a very different thing from a northern garden with drastic seasonal changes in color and luminescence.

If you're going to be using spotlights for accent lighting make sure that you are highlighting the things in your garden that are most important. Your visitors need to know how to get in and out of your garden or outdoor space. They need to know where they can step -- and what they need to stay away from. Properly designed garden lights provide gentle and easy to understand cues as to how to navigate your outdoor space.

Hide Your Light Under a Bush (el)

In most cases, you will find a hiding the light fixture itself is a huge plus in the overall effect that you are going to create in your garden. You can hide your lighting fixture without a whole lot of extra work. There is usually no need to build a moss covered camouflaged enclosure. You can simply place the fixture behind a shrub or if lighting from above, between the branches of a tree. The most important reason to do this is to eliminate glare while still highlighting the most beautiful features of your garden.

In conjunction with hiding your light source, you can also change the effect that it produces. You can do this by placing the source within a bush or behind dense foliage to provide a soft diffuse light that gently illuminates a larger area without drawing attention to any one feature or planting.

Another reason for your light source to be hidden within a planting or up out of the way is so that people will not injure themselves by tripping over it or stepping on it. We also want to take into consideration the work that's going to be done in your garden. Especially if your garden is very large, you are going to have workers there doing mulching, pruning, planting and mowing. Plan from the beginning to have your fixtures placed so that ongoing garden maintenance does not present a threat to them.

Once all of this amazingly beautiful, perfectly positioned and oh so carefully planned lighting is installed you going to have to control it from somewhere. That somewhere is inside your house. Remember that your garden lighting is not only there for beauty, it's also a central part of the safety and security for your home, your family and your guests. Make sure that everybody in your home understands how to operate the outdoor lighting system.

Well we've reached the end of article 7 in our series on garden lights. Please join me for number eight, where we will take a look at some specific outdoor lighting ideas for the different parts of your home, not just your garden.