landscape lighting design Article

Low Voltage Landscape Lighting Design
By Bob Taylor
You spend all that time creating a masterpiece garden that the neighbors will envy. Ooops. You just realize you forgot to install the landscape lighting. The best time to plan a good landscape lighting design is when you are planning your garden layout.

Landscape lighting design can be a simple lighting layout or a work of art blending nature with artificial light, incorporating color, shape and texture. You choose. What looks ordinary and dull during the day can be transformed into rich color during the darker hours of night. The nature of landscape lighting demands versatility. With a wide variety of different surfaces and objects to be illuminated the type of light and its placement needs to be considered very carefully.

Gather Your Ideas
Go over your garden design and decide on the objects, plants or trees you want to highlight with. If you have one prominent feature in one part of the garden such as a large tree or a sculpture then you can concentrate your lighting on that object and have low level ground lighting surrounding it in the rest of the garden. On the other hand you may decide just to scatter general low level ground lighting in amongst plants of the same height which will create a flat effect but will give you a rainbow of color.

Floodlight or Spotlight
To help you with your landscape lighting design there are typically two lamp and reflector types. The wide angle lenses are used to flood a surface with a wash of light where a narrow angled lens is used for laser-like accuracy to put a spot of light on an object. Flood lighting works best by positioning it under leafy shrubs and trees. By doing this the floodlight will create shadows within the foliage and spill out onto surrounding plants. If you are trying to light a very large tree you may consider several floodlights to get an even spread of light. Spotlights work best if they are correctly positioned and aimed at the feature you are trying to highlight. A good way to get this right is to temporarily connect the spotlight and move it backwards and forwards until the right amount of light is highlighting the feature.

Color
Color is an important consideration for any landscape lighting design. The most common source of light is white light. When white light is used it generally brings out the true color of the surrounding plants and objects because it contains all the visible colors. By using colored filters or sleeves attached to the light fitting, colored light can be used to emphasize the natural color of the surrounding plant foliage. Colors such as yellow are useful to use as it is a warm color and brings out the best in the wood of trunks and branches. Reds and Blues are also very popular colors to use.