Great Lighting Can Add Visual Appeal to Any Garden
There are many different potential ways to light up your garden and property at night. Garden light can be the paints that you use to color the dark canvas at night to any way of your choosing. However, if you’re not particurally artistic this can be an incredibly intimidating prospect. Luckily, there are several basic steps you can use to draw out an effective plan and then some general rules to follow so that your lighting plan turns out to be the tasteful and impressive style you want that increases your property value and adds to the curb appeal of your home.
Initial Garden Light Design Steps
As with almost everything in life, if you are trying to install the perfect lights for your garden, lots of planning is essential. Try to start by making a sketch of your property. Emphasize the largest structures and try to imagine what adding different lights and lighting styles would do to them. Alternatively, if you’re more artistically impaired but computer literate, take a digital photo of your property and open it in Photoshop. In Photoshop you can apply a filter to the image to make it into a sketch and print it out, saving you time and lots of drawings of stick figures. If you’re really good at Photoshop you can also add different filters and effects to show what your garden would look like when its darker and then add light effects at different angles to simulate the effects of light.
When you’re first trying to decide where to put lights, start with the pathways leading to your house and through your garden. Decide which style you would like to have these lit in. From this, figure out how you would like to have the initial entrance to your house lit up. Then, decide on the ways you would like to light the larger structures in your yard. From this you should be able to figure out the smaller accent lights you would like to use for smaller structures and plants.
Now that you know the general steps in drawing up a garden light plan, you can incorporate several basic rules of design to make sure that your lighting plan is the envy of the neighborhood.
Try to Use the Minimum Amount of Light You Can
When you’re designing your garden lighting plans, the temptation may be to bathe everything in a ton of light. This is the number one design mistake most budding gardeners make. Instead, opt for a less is more approach and try to simulate the light level you might experience on a cloudless night under a full moon. Avoid doing things such as using outdoor floodlights to light an entire area of your garden. Use the weaker light to accent your garden and particular plants or structures, such as an old tree or your favorite flowerbed to really draw attention to them and bring them out at night. Choose the bulb you will use for each purpose that its supposed to serve. A bulb for backlighting a tree for instance, will be much stronger than the mushroom bulbs you might place along paths.
Try to Include Water
If you can, try to include water into your garden as part of your lighting plan. This can be with the use of a small pond or even something as simple as a birdbath. You can play with the reflections of the lights you install off the water or even just use it as a place where moonlight and starlight can be reflected. Whatever way you decide to use it, water is definitely a great element to add to any garden light design.
Hide Your Light Fixtures
If at all possible, you should be able to see the light given off from your light fixtures, but not see the fixtures themselves. There are some exceptions to this rule. Sometimes you may want to show the light fixtures, such as if you’re using lanterns to create an old-fashioned feel and other times you simply may not be able to hide the lights. One thing you do not want to do is overuse decorative lights in your garden or lawn. Save the decorative lights for Christmas, when you can place loads of giant lit-up Santas on your lawn, but don’t place a plastic frog or gnome with a light inside every fifteen feet.
Use Solar Lights To Eliminate Hassle
If you want to cut most of the hassle out of lighting your property, consider using solar garden lights. These lights require no wiring and you literally stick them in the ground and forget about them. No need to worry around installing the right transformers and keeping the wires out of sight.
For all the hassle that they save, the major downsides you need to take into consideration. First, because these lights need to have a solar panel on them, the styles that you can use are somewhat limited. Second, the lights need to be placed in an area with access to direct sunlight, so on cloudy days or in shadier areas they might not be as bright or burn for as long. Because of these limitations, solar garden lights usually work best when used as small pathway or deck lights. They generally come in the styles most people want to light their paths with and areas such as the driveway are relatively open to sunlight in most homes.
It is incredibly easy to make a garden light design that you can be proud of. It doesn’t take a professional or even someone who is artistically gifted. If you follow some basic tips and use your imagination, there’s no end to the different lighting styles that you can come up with for your garden.
