Lighting- new ways of transforming the garden
25 years ago, outdoor lighting for most people meant a porch light and maybe a flood light next to the shed that would come on every time the neighbour’s cat walked past. With LED lights in their dull infancy, a full lighting scheme was expensive to run and reserved for the public realm or people with mansions.
Fast forward to today and garden lighting is going mainstream, which is recognisable by the fact that it has arrived in every hardware store in the form of cheap solar powered torches on a stake. This shows the momentum BUT solar for lighting is in the same place LEDs were in 2000. They’re not suitable for high intensity, properly controlled garden lighting systems.
Maybe it’s what we’ll use in 20 years, but for now, don’t get tempted. I want to talk about the great low voltage systems and low energy LED fixtures that make garden lighting affordable(ish), easy to install, and economical to run. However, for some reason, there
are still contractors who install mains voltage garden lighting, and I can’t help talking a little smack about that first.
Mains voltage garden lighting is a pain because…
Each of the light fixtures needs to be connected individually by an electrician to a chunky, rigid armoured cable, which you have to work around when you plant.
Furthermore, if one light goes out, it can happen that all the others on the same circuit go out as well. Then it’s up to you to test every single garden light to find the culprit. I remember the experience with the old Christmas lights and that didn’t even require ducking under shrubs and climbing on trees- or worse, lift in ground lights!
Introducing…
Low voltage garden lighting systems:
These are simple- you plug the hub, which will control your settings, into an indoor or outdoor socket. From the hub, you get a number of channels, which act like circuits that can be switched on and off independently of each other. An app allows you to combine the channels into different settings. You can have multiple hubs and manage them from the same app to create many different scenes.
Installation is easy as you only need to snake a nimble cable though your bed and clamp the light fixtures onto it where you want them. No electrician needed! My favourite system is by In-Lite (pardon the plug)
Why and how- Design tips for lighting your garden
To be honest, outdoor lighting is still not cheap, so believe me when I say it’s worth forking out a little extra to have a professional design your scheme for the maximum wow factor. You’ll thank yourself when you look through those big patio doors, which I bet you have. I’ll even
go as far as betting that you’re here because you’re tired of staring at the black hole out there every night. Or maybe you’re in a remote area and it’s just a bit scary at night, and you might have looked into curtains, just to find out what a proper set of curtains costs.
Think about this- unless you own some massive artwork, your view of the outside is your biggest canvas and a great opportunity. Especially if you have a nice garden and don’t work from home, you probably don’t even see it for 6 months of the year unless you put in a few lights! Granted, some gardens don’t look great in the winter, but that can be remedied, and it’s such a contributor to wellbeing. My lights are on a disk to dawn sensor, and my heart does a little joyful jump every time they come on- Aaaah!
It’s about the feature, not the fixture
The aim is to illuminate the tree, pergola or whatever feature you want to showcase so it glows and reflects light. You want to avoid the hot spots you get when you can see the light source, so you need to work with baffles that channel the light and the correct beam angles.
Three types of lighting you need
There are three types of lighting: “ambient” providing general overall illumination, “task” offering focused light for specific activities, and “accent” creating dramatic highlights or visual interest through directed beams
Avoiding Las Vegas and Heathrow- lighting tricks and effects
You’ll find yourself playing around with your garden lighting frequently- it’s just so much fun to try different effects. There are a few tricks and rules though:
- Uplighting: When you upplight a tree you’re looking for drama. Ideally, you will have two fixtures for this to sculpt the tree properly.
- Moonlighting: If you have a large tree, you can place a fixture into the tree and direct it downwards to mimic moonlight, which creates a pattern of branches and leaves below. It’s a nice alternative to light the ground without visible fixtures.
- Downlighting: After many trials and errors, I have come to realise that about 30% of lights should be downlights as this is the best way of capturing vegetation on the ground. Small spotlights on stakes are the most common fixture type but they’re easily obstructed by growing foliage and often end up backlighting just a few leaves.
- Drama: You can play with effects such as silhouetting where you direct the light to cast a shadow onto an adjacent wall- this creates a lot of drama. If you have a body of water and illuminate it, the reflections from the moving water create charming and dynamic effects on plants and structures nearby.
- The art of contrast: With lighting, less is more. You can easily overdo it. Avoid light levels that are too high and schemes that are too even. The charm of lighting is the contrast between light and dark. It’s not about documenting what’s there during the day- the mystique lies in the transformation. Think of it as a piece of art, a composition: You’ll want about 70% of the garden at similar light levels, 20% should be composed of larger, more intensely lit pools, a small number of feature pieces (mostly just one), and a repetition of secondary accents.
- Las Vegas and Heathrow Avoid overusing strip lighting, especially under a whole set of steps. Just like your driveway shouldn’t attract any airplanes, your steps shouldn’t look like a Las Vegas stage either. Do make level changes recognisable in the dark but keep it subtle. The reflected light from adjacent features may well do the job. If you do need a strip light make sure it has a diffuser or the individual LEDs will be visible as a series of dots, which looks about as classy as fairground lighting
Regulations for lighting- don’t get caught out
If you live in a designated A.O.N.B. (Area of Outstanding Beauty), you will need planning permission for garden lighting. Outdoor lighting in Green Belts should be designed to minimize light pollution and avoid disrupting sensitive ecosystems and wildlife such as bats.
Check with your council’s planning department if they need a lighting plan. If so, you will need to provide all the fixture specifications, beam angles, lumens per fixture, light spill mitigation measures etc. You’ll need a pro to help you with that before you spend any money on fixtures. It’s easy to think you’ll get away with it, especially with the easy to install systems, but trust me- there’s always a snitch that will sing to the council, either because he or she jealous of your nice lights, or because you’ve gotten a bit carried away and your neighbour had to get black out blinds.
Between you and me, it’s often just a very technical tick box exercise you need to go through, and of course we comply with the rules- however, I’ve strangely yet to meet a planning officer who can read a lighting plan or checks how it’s implemented after they’ve approved it. Makes you wonder where else your council tax is being used so efficiently…