How to Design your Garden Lighting

Designing lighting for your garden should be a process done with care for both the health of your garden as well as the look of your home. Planning ahead helps avoid unnecessary spending and unexpected surprises, and it also helps to give you the right feel for an important part of your landscape.

Start by drawing a map of your landscape. Determine where all of your current light sources are and their coverage. Then look over your garden and decide what type of lighting you are looking for. Do you want provide general lighting for the whole area or do you want to accent a particular feature such as a tree?

Once you have your goals mapped out, determine how many lights you will need. Update your map that you drew with the planned light and get a sense of how the new lights will fill in the space. A few bright lights will create a lot illumination, but also a lot of shadows. Conversely, with soft ambient light you’ll need more fixtures spread out with more wiring, and hence more wattage, to run them.

Consider your neighbors and the rooms in your home. If you have a glaring light aimed any window, no matter how good it makes your garden look, it won’t be practical in the long run.

With your plan in mind, determine the tools you’ll use. Will you use a low-voltage system or solar powered lamps? Solar powered avoids wires so you can simply fill in your design within budget constraints. These are however more limited in available styles. A low-voltage system will require wiring, so revise your plan so that unsightly wires are not running across open patches of grass. This system will also need to have an electrical outlet nearby, therefore look over your wiring with this in mind as well as voltage drop. The further a lamp is from the source of power, the lower its intensity. Generally speaking for most wires, don’t put more wattage on the wire than feet (no more than 100 watts on 100 feet). Test the distances in your garden with a hose or rope beforehand and think about how much wattage you’ll need for each lamp.

Having looked at your wants and the physical limitations, now plan your budget. Greater intensity lights require more wattage as does a large garden requiring more feet of wire. Both of these may necessitate a larger or even multiple transformers to power your lighting system. Add these constraints into your budget and revise your plan if necessary, reducing the number of lamps or their intensity.

Finally, pick a style of lamps you’d like and configure this into your budget, revising your style choice or plan accordingly.

Related Information

How to Install Garden Lighting

Ideas for Illuminating Your Garden