Illuminate Your Garden with Landscape Lighting

Once you have planted the flowers and other foliage and determined where each rock and path should be in your garden to make it your masterpiece, your work is not done. Your garden may look sensational during the daylight hours, but what about during the evening hours? You can create a stunning garden landscape that may be enjoyed at night by the inventive use of lighting.

Define the Purpose For Landscape Lighting in Your Garden

Before you invest in any landscape lighting, ask yourself what your purposes are for wanting illumination in your garden. Perhaps you want to set a soft, romantic mood during the evening hours. Maybe you have a bench or a shadowy garden corner you need to illuminate for security reasons. A path leading through the garden may require landscape lighting to mark its boundaries. You might want to highlight some features of your garden like a water fountain or pond.

Decide Where Landscape Lighting Should Go in Your Garden

After you have defined your reasons for wanting to add landscape lighting to your garden you should sketch your yard landscape. Include existing lights, buildings, benches, trees and shrubs, as well as the vegetation and decorations in the garden itself. Each of these items will either reflect light or absorb it. Estimate the height of each of the objects, especially the foliage.

Match the reason for lighting to specific locations in your garden. You may want to illuminate a bench along the path with a pole type lamp placed behind it. A soft mood can be achieved by landscape lighting hidden under shrubs. A path may require a series of short stake lights along its border on one side or on both sides. A water fountain can be enhanced with a spotlight and a pond can have soft lighting around its perimeter.

Mark the types of landscape lighting you want on your garden sketch in the locations you want the lights to eventually be. Try to visualize the effect. You do not want too many or too few lights for your purpose. Too many landscape lights will make your garden look like a Christmas tree sales lot and will annoy your neighbors. Too few landscape lights will not enhance the nighttime beauty of your garden.

Determine How Much Effort You Want to Expend

The landscape lighting which requires the greatest effort to install is 120-volt lighting. Wiring for these types of garden lights must be buried at a depth of eighteen inches or encased in conduit to protect it from water. A licensed electrician has to install the electrical components.

Low voltage landscape lighting for the garden needs only an outdoor receptacle and a transformer. The transformer converts the 120 volts coming from the household line to a usable 12 volts to operate the lights. The cables are easier to move around the garden and requires only for the electrical cable to be hidden in an unobtrusive location.

The easiest landscape lighting to place in the garden is solar lighting. This type of lighting has no cords to be hidden. It should be positioned in such a way that the photovoltaic cell in the lighting fixture receives enough light during the day to allow it to shine at night.

Determine How Much You Want to Spend on Landscape Lighting

A high voltage landscape lighting fixture for your garden can cost $100 or more. Then there is the cost of labor for the electrical contractor who would install the wiring for it. That makes high voltage landscape lighting the most expensive of the garden lighting solutions.

A lower cost landscape lighting system for the garden is low voltage lighting. The lighting can be installed by a do-it-yourselfer for a price of around $30 to $300 per light.

The least expensive of the three types of landscape lighting is solar lighting. Since solar lights rely upon the rays of the sun and an inbuilt photovoltaic device to work, they do not necessitate installation costs or a lot of money to operate. The initial price of the solar lights is the only cost which will be incurred. If you are lighting a darkened portion of your garden and the solar landscape light will not receive adequate sunlight during the day, you will need to have a solar panel installed in a high-sunlight location and run wiring to your solar lights. Some solar landscape lighting utilizes batteries for days when sunlight is inadequate.

Some Landscape Lighting Techniques in the Garden

If you wish to highlight one thing in your garden like statues, a gazing ball or a fountain, you should consider using a few landscape lighting fixtures with lower intensity bulbs. Place these at various angles and distances. A single bright light shined directly on the object will create harsh shadows.

Landscape lighting which makes soft spots of light are good for garden paths. Space the lights at equal distances along the path you want illuminated.

Blue tinted lights allow for a moonlight-type mood in your garden landscape.

A uniquely shaped tree or shrub in the garden may be silhouetted or illuminated in such a way as to cast an interesting shadow against an outbuilding.

Sources Used:

http://www.landscapelights.com/shop/files/ll_design_help.pdf Landscape Lighting Tips