Garden lighting: the last thing anybody plans and the first thing people notice

Outdoor living that stops at dusk is half a garden

We live outdoors here in a way most of the country does not, and for eight months of the year the pleasant part of the day starts about the time the light goes. A garden that is not lit is a garden you look at from inside.

Get the lighting right and the space works in the evening: somewhere to have people over, or somewhere to sit with a cup of tea before bed. That is the whole argument, and everything below is detail.

What to light

Drive through any street at night and the houses that stand out are the ones where somebody thought about this. The trick is to light features, not areas: paths, water features, a specimen plant, a fence line. Light the structure of the garden and leave the middle of it dark.

Then light the places people actually stand. Patios, decks, the area around the barbecue, under a pergola, around the pool. A garden lit only at its edges leaves everyone squinting in the middle of it.

Safety, which is the unglamorous half

Outdoor lighting is the cheapest way to make a garden safe to walk through after dark. Light the paths, the walkways and the driveway. Light anything with a step in it, and light uneven ground.

Steps and level changes are where people come unstuck, and a low light at the edge of a tread does more for that than a bright light overhead.

It is also a deterrent

Lighting designed properly around entrances, parking and walkways makes a property a poor prospect for anyone with an interest in it. It is the cheapest deterrent on the list, and it works on the nights nobody is home to notice.

That does not mean floodlighting the place. A property lit like a car park announces that it has something to guard, and makes every remaining shadow darker. Even, considered light along the approaches does the job better.

Extra-low voltage, and why it suits a garden

Most garden lighting here runs at extra-low voltage off a transformer, not at mains voltage. It is safer around damp ground, planting and children, and the cabling is less demanding to run. It is not a reason to dig without thinking: most gardens also carry mains at some depth to a shed, a pump or the pool plant, and that cable does not care what the lighting runs at.

It still wants installing properly. Salt air, wet season rain and the general enthusiasm of tropical growth are hard on outdoor fittings, and the difference between gear that lasts two seasons and gear that lasts ten is mostly in the specification and the terminations.

Control it from your phone if you want to

App control has changed garden lighting more than anything else in the last decade. Instead of a timer buried in the transformer, you set the lighting from your phone: subtle early in the evening, brighter when people arrive, off when everyone goes home.

Brad's view is that it is a lot of fun, which is as good a reason as any. It is also genuinely useful when you are away, and it costs very little more if it goes in at installation.

From a simple twelve volt run to a designed scheme

Garden lighting runs the whole way from a straightforward twelve volt installation to a designed scheme with app control, and BH Electrics does both ends of that range.

Appraisals are free, and the useful version happens after dark. Walking a garden at night with someone who does this for a living beats guessing at it in daylight.