There’s something you can plant in your garden that makes your property more beautiful, safer and even more secure. Adding lights to your landscaping, or “nightscaping,” as it is called, can be as simple or as elaborate as you want to make it.
Best of all, lighting can be as varied and personal as the yard itself.
Artist and landscape designer Rob Fuoco has at least a half-dozen kinds of lighting in his Burlington, Conn., home’s gardens, each one suited to a different purpose. Amid the mugho pine and old-fashioned phlox next to the stone steps leading to the house’s main entrance, a low-mounted post lamp casts light on the stairway, providing drama and improving the safety of the steps, which are wide pieces of stone set in a curve.
An old boathouse at the lake’s edge has two low floodlights pointed up toward it, illuminating a rescued piece of ornamental iron fence and the pathway that goes past it.
“You can add lots of lighting to your garden and property without making the place look like a gas station,” Fuoco says.
On a small rise above the house, in a garden designed for meditating, four worn wooden columns punctuate the corners of a lush bed of pachysandra. An old metal tub with a fountain in it sits in the center of the pachysandra, and each column is uplit by a spotlight nestled in the groundcover.
Near the front of the property, a salvaged Greek Revival fence post topped with an antique carriage lamp contains a pillar candle that is lit for visitors. “For my gardens, I love drifts of meadow flowers around strong design bones,” says Fuoco, whose varied use of lighting materials and styles helps convey the message of each garden.
Matthew Giampietro, a landscape designer with Westbrook Landscape Inc. in Chesire, Conn., advises, “Keep [lighting] simple, and keep it subtle. It is better to light an area, highlighting one feature within the area, rather than highlighting seven objects in one area.”
Giampietro, who studied landscape architecture at Syracuse University and spent four months living in Japan studying rock gardens and waterfalls in Kyoto, says he understood the importance of lighting after becoming more experienced with garden design.
“I saw that lighting was a vital part,” he says, “especially with water gardens. It adds a whole other realm to the design. How the garden looks at night is very important.”
Lighting is integral to the design of a garden he created in Prospect, Conn., for John G. Chiarella Jr. and his family, though if you visit during the daytime, the light sources are so subtly placed, you don’t notice them. Small, slim black canister lights are trained upward on the garden’s distinctive trees, which include a Palmate Japanese maple, a dwarf locust and Hinoki cypress, among many others. The subtle illumination makes the trees look like sculptures in the darkness. In the pergola at the far end of a swimming pool, small downlights punctuate the winding tendrils of a flourishing wisteria, while at the other end of the pool, lights are tucked in amid the dusky green and gold of spreading junipers and a low mugho pine, cut pom-pom style.
Water moves from rockfall to rockfall through the center of the garden, ending in a pool that actually goes under a house corner mounted on piers. There are bright koi fish swimming in this pool, which has, of course, underwater spotlights.
When deciding on exterior lighting for your property, the first issues to consider are function and focus, says David Director, president of Connecticut Lighting Centers in Hartford. Do you want to highlight a wonderful stand of trees? Illuminate your deck? Subtly add more light to the front of the house?
“Outdoor lights are taking a page from indoor lights,” says Director, adding that many consumers want their exterior lighting to reflect the interior design of their homes. “But you don’t want people to look at the light source; you want them to look at the effect.”
And you can get a lot of effect from a small amount of light. At the company’s Hartford showroom, a deck is illuminated with small wedge-shaped lights. A mere 18.6 watts, the cast aluminum lights–which are available in several colors, finishes and styles and can be mounted with the pointy end up or down–add just enough light to make the deck feel like a place for after-dark socializing.
To add light to a pathway or a display of plantings, Director says he might recommend low-voltage path lighting. Once available in a limited range of styles and only in black, these path lights can now be coordinated with the landscape’s design. One can choose a minimalist dome in dark metal or brass, but the choices from there include lights ranging in style from Mission to Oriental to something out of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The minimum budget for adding lighting to make your property safer and more dramatic would be about $1,000, Director says, plus the services of an electrician. “Much more typical is $2,000 to $3,000, something that would give you a little more drama,” he says. The light sources themselves–the path lights, lamps and other fixtures–also can be highly designed and beautiful and cost more.
Once you’ve decided on the lighting effects you want to achieve, the next call should be to a licensed electrician. It’s one thing to run an extension cord to light up an evening party in the back yard, but to permanently install lighting fixtures that will be subject to wind and weather, a professional electrician is the safest way to go.
Fuoco also recommends, asking your electrician about an interior switch so you can activate your lighted waterfall or uplight your white birch trees from the comfort of indoors.
