Garden lighting makes gardens attractive and accessible long after dusk and allows gardens to be enjoyed after a hard days work when the sun has set. Lighting adds atmosphere to an evening garden, allowing access at anytime. At night your landscape can wear a different face and have a totally different look from its daytime appearance.

Beauty

Give your garden an elegant look by adding lighting to it. To enjoy your garden at night, the lighting must be just right. Beautiful glass oil lanterns will add a sparkle in daylight and a magical glow in the evening. Landscapes emerge at dark under subtle lighting to create wonderful shapes in hauntingly beautiful sculptured drama. Whether glowing with an inner light or outlined in an elegant tracery against the night sky, landscape lighting paints the beauty of natural and cultivated forms, a pool, fountains and pathways with subtle shade, shadow and colour.

Benefits

Lighting has a number of benefits including, Safety - illuminating pathways, indicating hazards, such as steps, or marking safest routes. Path lighting provides a safe walkway and adds to your home's security. Atmosphere - The loss of daily enjoyment is solvable through garden lighting, by transforming darkened patios, decks and flower beds into a welcome fantasy of light.

Safety

Lighting steps for safety is an obvious requirement in any garden, but functionality can be coupled with decorative merit if the lighting is subtle. Safety is always the key consideration. All lighting units need to be certified as suitable for outdoor use, which generally means they must be weather proof. There is perhaps nothing more beckoning than a well lit garden path.

Different Techniques of Garden Lighting:

- Up lighting is the most commonly used technique to illuminate trees, walls and sculptures and down lighting is a mimic of natural light - the fixture is located overhead with the light shining down from above.

- Moonlighting can be achieved by placing the fixture high above the ground and to produce a broad, moonlight effect.

- Shadowing techniques require the strong shape of plants such as yucca's, and surfaces such as a wall or lawn to create the most powerful effect.

- Spotlighting is used sparingly to pick out larger plants, trees, statues and architectural features.

- Floodlights are a broad light beam that covers large areas and can create dramatic silhouettes.

- Accent Lights are small fixtures placed close to the ground which provide a subtle source of decorative lighting almost anywhere in the garden.

- Spread lighting uses wide beam angles to light larger features such as lawn areas, flowerbeds and borders and low shrubs makes strolling around a garden in the late evening very pleasurable.

- Cross technique is used to pick out and highlight the statue, urn, gnarled tree trunk, bonsai, archway, etc.

- Silhouetting technique is often used to highlight the outline trees, palms or archways.

Garden Lighting ideas

To create a balanced and interesting atmosphere in the night time garden, use a variety of fixtures and lighting angles, placing fixtures in the foreground, middle distance and background. A really quick and easy way to add light to the garden, without wiring, is a kit that uses solar cells to collect power during the day and lights up at night. Kits are available at most discount stores and also with discount online shopping.

Up lighting, down lighting and side lighting are the three basic forms of garden lighting. Use a combination of all the three for the most pleasing result. Lighting systems come in low-voltage and standard-voltage configurations. Use standard voltage for large areas and for security, low voltage to accent individual plants.