Ideas for Illuminating Your Garden

Illuminating your garden doesn’t have to be a difficult process. In fact, it should be a fun way to accent a positive feature of your home that is lost after dusk every night. Looking at a professionally designed landscape can make you feel a bit intimidated, but with a few solid ideas to get you started, you’ll be on your way to beautifully lit landscape.

To begin with, consider giving your garden a general amount of light with diffuse lighting. This technique will provide ambient light that will be the background on which to build the accent lights of your garden and will reduce harsh shadows. Put low standing lights near flower beds and under shrubs to create this effect.

Once you have this foundation laid, look over your garden. Do you have sculptures or trees that standout during the day? Well then make them standout at night by using spotlights that are low angled. You can do this by directly shinning light on the objects, either one lamp or multiple to give a greater view depending on the size and details of interest. Or if it’s near a wall, you can either backlight the object to create a silhouette or spotlight it to create a shadow on the wall.

If you have a pathway through your garden, light this as well. You can either use standing lights angled down or lights that are inserted in the ground to illuminate the path to provide guidance and variation to you garden lights. If you have a partially covered walkway, you can install lights above for down lighting for a similar effect.

Aside from giving light to aid vision, you can change out bulbs in the lamps to give your garden a splash of color. Additionally, in the vein of Christmas lights, there are strings of lights available to add texture to bushes, trees, and other fixtures in your garden.

Play around with your lights as well. While a kit will have a recommendation for set up, you know your garden best so make adjustments. It will take a few nights to get a feel for what works best, and you may find that you need more or less lights as time goes on to give the right look to your garden. Also, consider the level of activity in your garden. If you are planning on having dinner there every night, use more lights, if rarely, buy some temporary lights like Chinese lanterns or Tiki torches to provide extra light when you need it.

Related Information

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Different Styles of Lighting for your Garden