Garden Lighting Design

Be honest, you’ve thought it too; lighting your garden is a bit flash. We’ve become curiously bashful about “illuminations” considering that the idea was born in the pleasure gardens of Georgian London, magical places lit by oil lamps hanging in the trees. As soon as it gets dark, we pull the curtains.
Or we did, until lifestyle changes and advances in technology collided. The best LEDs (light emitting diodes) are now powerful enough to light up all but the biggest trees; they can shine as warmly as other sources; and they have a lifespan of 50,000 hours. They’re expensive to buy but the running cost is less than a tenth of halogen, so it it’s not so batty to switch on when you aren’t outside.
What’s more, outside is the new curtains. More of us are replacing brick walls with undraped glass and, whether for diversion or a sense of security, prefer to banish the blackness by extending our indoor remote-control lighting to the garden. Crestron Green Light and Lutron Homeworks (lighting control systems), allow you to orchestrate multiple zones - with son as well as lumière if you invest in Crestron’s new outdoor speakers.
“You programme the system from your laptop,” explains lighting designer Guy Singleton of Imagine This. “Instead of calling it scene one, two, three, you pull up ‘barbecue’, or ‘glass of wine by the loggia’.”

In effect, this turns one garden into several. Still, too many options can be tiresome once the button-twiddling thrill wears off. Light Symphony is a simpler alternative (though it too knows where you live and can switch on at dusk). It is wireless, so very flexible. And there’s an app so you can use your mobile phone as a remote, at home or away.
A balmy dinner overlooking a well-lit hotel garden often inspires that first call to a lighting designer - with one proviso. “Clients say ‘we don’t want it to look like Disneyland’,” says Mike Shackleton of Ornamental Garden Lighting, a former film director. “It’s the British mentality. We prefer subtle to in-your-face.” That goes for the fittings too, which ought to be well-hidden.

Fixtures and fittings
Spike lights are very versatile. You can use them to pick out plants up to 10ft (3m) tall, creating atmosphere with form and with the colour that moonlight otherwise leaches out. David Haslehurst trained as a gardener at Buckingham Palace and designed plant props for television and film, before setting up Moonlight Design. He likes airy bamboos with painted stems and feathery fiery-leaved acers; both create a silent-movie flicker in the slightest breeze.
“You have to know whether plants are deciduous or not, perennial or not. You might see pretty flowers now, but that border is going to be empty half of the year,” David says. “You also have to know how a garden is going to mature.”
Adjustable spike spots bring inanimate objects to life, too: cross-lit from below, the scrolled arms of a Lutyens bench cast dramatic shadows. David favours top-of-the-market Hunza products from New Zealand, which makes a plethora of copper, stainless steel and powder-coated aluminium fittings: on poles as well as spikes; for mounting on a tree to dapple the ground with pretend moonlight or on a wall to wash over attractive brick or a climbing rose. New this year is the Pure range in which the array (light source), is not resin-sealed into the fitting, as is usual, but pin-mounted so you can replace the LED if it fails or for a different effect.

LEDs are much cooler than other light sources, so won’t burn foliage or bare feet, but big-daddy trees need the oomph of metal halide bulbs. Mike Shackleton recommends the Perseus 35W or Olympus 70W or 150W recessed uplighters, from Lighting for Gardens. They have a double lens, the top one never gets hotter than 70C, and you can mow over them. Both brands run off the mains - via an armoured cable if double-digging is not to prove fatal. Wiring for low voltage lighting can lie on the surface, but it’s usually buried six inches deep.