Path lighting is one of the few essential tasks that you have to accomplish to properly light up your landscape.  Garden path lighting not only increase your yard’s beauty, but they also improve safety by preventing trips and falls over unseen hazards that may lay along the most traveled routes around your house.  To properly design the lights so that they are functional, attractive, and fit in with your current garden light plans, there are several things that you should pay attention to.

First, all light fixtures are rated using different measurements, but if you can find ones that are rated in candle feet it will be much easier to determine where to place your lights.  Candle feet will tell you how much light the fixture gives off and it’s easy to interpret this number.  Candle feet are how wide the circle of light that the light gives off will be.  So if a light is rated at 20 candle feet, it should make a circle of light twenty feet in diameter from where you place the fixture.  If you have a light rated like this, you know you should place the lights about twenty feet apart so that their light overlaps a little bit and there are no gaps.

When you actually place your lights, the best place to place them will be in flowerbeds, not in the lawn as many people do.  Placing your path lighting fixtures in the lawn could result in them being run over by the lawnmower at worst.  At best, its going to make a massive headache for you every time you try to mow when you have to navigate the mower around them and then possibly break out the weedwhacker so that you can cut down the grass right next to the fixture.  It’s a big headache that’s easily avoided with a little be better placement of your lights.

Finally, when you’re placing your lights, consider putting them on alternating sides as you go down the path.  This looks more natural and lets the lights overlap while avoiding making your paths look like runways for incoming aircraft.

Designing your garden path lighting isn’t as hard as putting together the rest of your outdoor landscape lighting, but it is very important that you get it right.  Making sure your lights are properly spaced apart and give your paths good light will help make all the parts of your property more accessible and safe.  If you install your lights wrong, you end up with dark or dim spots in your garden lighting pattern just where you need them the brightest and these dark areas can include any number of tripping hazards, like a child’s mis-placed skateboard or other toys that become really hazardous late at night.

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Filed under: Designing and Installing Landscape Lighting • Garden Lighting Tips

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