LED Home Lighting

The Difference Between Garden Lighting and Home Lighting

Garden lighting is in many respects a close cousin of home lighting. It is a long established doctrine of garden design to consider outdoors as simply another room (or set of rooms) and the basic principles for creating effective home lighting broadly apply to garden lighting also.

Lighting designers group different types of lighting under particular categories, these being: ambient, accent, decorative and task lighting. But before we look further at these categories, it’s worth reviewing the main ways in which outdoor spaces differ from interior rooms.

The most obvious difference is scale; rooms are bounded by walls and ceilings and thus are comparatively small compared to outside where the sky really is the limit height wise and your boundaries are potentially as far as your eye can see. Where lighting is concerned this presents an interesting issue: lack of reflection. Interior lighting always reflects off the containing surfaces and fills the space with ambient light; outdoor lighting for the most part disappears into space.

The second point follows on from the lack of reflected ambient light. Outside you have not only a blank canvas but also a black canvas; without lighting you cannot see anything so in a sense you are free to ignore the real, physical layout of your garden and project whatever takes your fancy. If you don’t want your garden shed in the scene for example you can quite easily make it disappear at night. Conversely you can just as easily create a focal point that isn’t apparent during the daytime.

The third clear difference relates to function; you may indeed treat your garden as an additional room, or suite of rooms, but you will in all likelihood want to use that space very differently to how you use indoors. Just as you would use quite different lighting for a bedroom compared to say a kitchen, most people use outdoor lighting to create a relaxed mood for unwinding and socialising.

Different Types of Outdoor Lighting

Ambient lighting is used slightly differently outdoors and is less a platform to support other lighting types and more an effect in its own right. It is most commonly employed to provide a background glow in certain zones, rather than picking things out sharply, which is largely the role of accent lighting.

Both accent and decorative lighting perform much the same function in the garden as in the home; their jobs are simply to accentuate certain features and attract attention respectively.

Task lighting in a garden is something of a misnomer. Few people actually want enough light to be able to work or read outdoors, they do however want to be able to follow a path without falling into a flowerbed, or find the latch in a doorway and that’s usually the scope of task lighting outdoors.

The category to which any specific garden light fitting belongs depends to a large extent on what its characteristics are how it is used. For example a spotlight could be pointed up at a tree (accent) or diffused onto a flat surface such as a fence (ambient) or even angled downwards to illuminate a pathway (task). It’s doubtful that a spotlight would ever qualify as decorative though.

This leads neatly to the topic of light fitting characteristics. Whether any given light fitting is suitable for any specific purpose depends largely on three qualities: beam angle; luminosity; and color. There is also the matter of whether the system use mains (usually 12v low voltage) or solar powered garden lighting, and also whether they are incandescent or LED garden lights, but this is covered in detail elsewhere as indicated by the links.

Main Features of Garden Lights

Beam angle determines whether the light is widely spread or tightly focused. Often it is desirable to be able to direct light to a specific spot and not spill out all over the place or shine in your eyes; other times the requirement is the exact opposite, for light to be emitted in all directions from the light source.

Luminosity is a measure of how bright a light source is. The perceived level of brightness can also be affected by beam angle and brightness, so for example a narrow beam spot light rated at 10w will seem to project brighter light than a general purpose bulb of the same nominal power, but the light will be confined to a small area. Also, cooler colours appear sharper and brighter to us than warmer ones (yellows and red).

Light color covers both color as usually understood (orange, lilac etc) and white light color temperature i.e. how “warm” or “cool” it appears. There is to a certain extent some overlap here since regardless of whether a light is actually say yellow or “warm white” it will lend a much softer, less well defined appearance to the subject being lit than either a blue colored or “cool white” light source.

However there is another factor to consider in a garden, which is the color already present (foliage, flowers, stone, water, etc) and the fact that some plants and trees are deciduous or change color as the seasons pass.

As a rule it is best to stick to white light or possibly slightly blue or green when directly illuminating planting. Warmer colors have a tendency to produce a somewhat garish and sickly looking result. Also, white light is neutral as regards seasonal changes and can enhance some aspects, for example up lighting a deciduous tree highlights the green canopy in spring and summer, brings a glow to autumn leaves and can look incredibly dramatic when the tree is bare in winter.

When used as standalone decorative features or reflected off flat surfaces or man-made objects though colored lights really do come into their own. Just try not to use colors for accent lighting unless you have a particular effect you’re aiming for.

Garden Spotlights

As hinted at above, garden spotlights can be really quite flexible. Relatively low powered units with a narrow beam are ideal for picking out detail, especially if they also tend towards cool white which makes objects seem much more crisp and dramatic. On the other hand, a high powered spot light with a reasonably wide beam angle is ideal for plighting a large tree, and if a warm bulb is used it can also be used for wall wash effects.

If the mounting for the spotlight allows it, you can angle the unit down to create either pools of light or beams that spread out on the ground, either of which can look quite effective as an alternative to traditional bollards for pathway markers.

Whether you choose to use a spotlight for up lighting, down lighting, back lighting or front lighting depends on the effect you want. Anything with an interesting shape can often be visually enhanced through the use of either back or up lighting, which naturally always looks dramatic. Back lighting of course is how you get eye-catching silhouettes, but in both cases you need to position the light source carefully so that it is not directly visible - a light shining in your eyes rather detracts from the intended effect.

Both backlight and up light also work well if used with planting that is dense enough to diffuse the light; for example, try positioning an LED spot light (LEDs give off no heat) close to the trunk of an Acer Palmatum (Japanese Maple tree) pointing up - this not only illuminates the internal branch structure but when the tree is in leaf it also resembles a large lampshade made of fine lattice work. It’s a good example of how to get two looks (daylight and night) from the same garden feature.

Main Uses of Garden Lighting

Outdoor lighting can serve many purposes, the most well known being safety, security, entertaining and aesthetic enjoyment. Being able to see where you’re going without walking into various hazards is a good enough reason for at least some garden lighting.

Whereas passive infra-red floodlights are effective for your own personal security when coming and going and certainly give warning to anyone else approaching your home, they’re not exactly easy on the eyes. But it’s a fact that most forms of lighting help to deter intruders, so even a modicum of ambient light out the back helps to keep unwanted visitors away without making your garden resemble a high security prison yard.

Entertaining outdoors has become very popular in recent years and many people use outdoor lighting to extend their living area out to the patio or deck and beyond. When installing lighting for this reason it’s helpful to treat the exercise much the same as you would when designing the decor and lighting for an interior room. Just as you divide you home into distinct zones (often, though not necessarily, corresponding one to one with specific rooms) you can mark your garden into zones which makes it easier then to understand the requirements of each area and illuminate it accordingly.

When installing garden lighting for purely aesthetic reasons i.e. to have something nice to look at in the evening as well as during the day, the world is your oyster. It is possible simply by placing lights in particular places and by varying light intensities to either showcase the inherent features of your garden or alternatively to create all manner of illusions. When the human eye sees a bright spot it automatically blocks out the surrounding area to a degree; you can take advantage of this to guide the eye where you want it to go while at the same concealing much that you would rather keep unseen.

To give an example, consider how the rules of perspective have conditioned us to expect that things become smaller, less bright and draw to a point as they recede. In the absence of the normal cues available during daylight hours, it is almost trivially easy to position lights in such a way as to fool the eye into believing that your garden goes back much further than it truly does and even in directions that don’t really exist.