Be a Night Owl

Be a Night Owl: Dress Up Your Garden With Lights

Creative lighting allows you to make a totally different look for your garden. Whether soft, subtle lighting to bring a few elements into focus, or specialist lighting equipment used to glamorous effect, consider lighting up your night.

Lighting in the Garden

Flooding the garden with overhead light creates too harsh an effect, creates light pollution and can annoy your neighbors. Avoid strong lights that may shine directly into the eyes of an onlooker opting, instead, for an offset source. Accentuate the theatrical effect of any garden illumination, and make the nighttime experience all the more enchanting by playing up shadows. Draw up a plan, taking into account the type of lighting required in each area, such as recessed lighting for a deck, directional spotlighting for a barbecue grill or underwater lighting for a fountain. Work out cabling circuits and plug points, and talk through your ideas with a qualified electrician or lighting engineer, before completing any new landscaping work. You can experiment with different lighting effects by simply using a powerful torch, or torches, held at different angles.

Outdoor rooms used for relaxation and entertaining can be lit in a similar way to indoor spaces, with low-level lamps and mini spots to highlight decorative elements

In contemporary settings, restrained use of colored lights can create stylish effects. Programed, color-changing fiber optics are an option for dynamic shows