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lighting design of a garden has really come to the fore in the last 10 years or so whereas before you would just have a lantern above the door and maybe a proximity light that blared across when someone came up the garden path now it's all done in a much more subtle fashion and people really want to show off the outdoor space at night as well and let's face it because everyone's working a lot of the daytime we want to really use the garden throughout the dusk and the night time period so we want to have it lit and we want to light it in the most flattering way possible led lights that means light emitting diode lights came onto the scene big time about 10 years ago and the beauty of these lights is they're much more efficient to run you can have tiny little one watt lights or commonly four to six watt lights occasionally go up to 50 watt but they will generate a lot of subtle output very economically and they are brilliant light you can either have the warm white light with them or the cold or white white and now the most popular trend seems to be for the warmer white light Lighting Plan when i start off with a garden and people say will you do a lighting plan obviously you obviously got to think of functionality you know people want to be able to get to the door in the dark and feel safe and they don't want to trip over anything but at the same time they want the space to look beautiful so i'll normally go perhaps for a lantern by the door maybe if we've got big containers with trees in them running outside the door then obviously we can just take a weeny little spotlight up through the bottom and light up the tree and then you can have path lights as well if you think you need to if that isn't spreading enough light you can put in little path lights and these might be actually fitted into the paving and just be little eyelid lights that alternate along the path and a very small very discreet fittings which is a joy that you can do with these led lights Garden Lighting you also then want to think of the garden as a whole and think how am i going to light it what features am i going to pick up now i am a big fan of passive light so if you've got a well-used kitchen room that looks out onto the garden and that's lit up it's lovely seeing the light spilling out of that building and that is often quite a lot and if you then have just lanterns on the table you might do a really low-key approach and just get away with that otherwise you might like to think well we've got a beautiful tree at the end of the garden we're going to actually put a big spotlight underneath that and light up the canopy if it's maybe got a very dense evergreen foliage canopy then you might want to silhouette it so you might want to shine a light from the back or the back side on either side or both sides and light it up like that you might want to put a big moonlight and it just gently washes down over the whole space giving it quite an eerie but rather magical look to it we've got a pool outside the landing window and every so often the full moon just hits the pool and it does mirror lighting it just bounces the light off the water and lights up the whole garden and i think that effect is magnificent now that's obviously the moon doing it for me but you can get a light fitting to create that mirror lighting and i think that is one of the most stunning types of lighting you can do water is generally a great thing to light so we've got a little lead tank here and i've got a tiny little led spotlight and i'm just gonna put it into the tank and it just lights the water from underneath and and water looks so fabulous when it's lit up at night i really think it is well worth doing if you've got a water feature you must must make it so you can use it at night [Music] if you've got features like i've got piers either side of my heart and i think a nice gentle light washing up either side of those piers is very attractive it just picks out those features and equally you can light it so it washes down so there are various ways you can do it and i often think a very good way to find out what you think works best is to just to get a very high beam torch go out at night with somebody else and just try just try side lighting with the torch over lighting with the torch washing up with the torch silhouetting all sorts of ways and just see which is the most effective and when you've decided that then you decide on the size of fitting you need how you're going to site it so you don't see it and and really i think subtleness is the key sometimes you go to a hotel and it's lit up and it's way over the top and fine for a hotel that wants to drag people in off the road perhaps but for your private house and garden you want to just enjoy it and you want it to be much softer looky subtle never see a fishing apart from perhaps a lantern i think that's that's really a big important point for me i never want to see massive great bucket spotlights or bollards here there and everywhere which really give the game way i just want to see the light that sean not the fitting lanterns i love and we use them a lot and when we've got a party or something like that we'll bring lots of them out but i also think their lovely candlelight is one of the romantic lights to eat by or have a glass of wine by so that's always lovely and also the bulb lights and um we've got lots of clients who like to string up bulb lights and it's really maybe quite a sixties thing to do but i think it still looks magnificent and if you've got a pergola or an area that you eat under or something and you just string lots of strings of these lights whether you have a warm white or a cool white or maybe even colored lights if you're feeling really zappy but they are a lovely way that you can put them up and you can experiment with it they're not massively expensive um and you can try them in stringing them between trees or timber posts or between windows or whatever you like but they really do make a place zing at night and neon tube light you know those sorts that you often see in signs you can also use for lighting areas and and people do like them for big events but generally in the garden for day to day we keep to the whites the warm white or the cool white um i just think perhaps it's a little bit over the top unless you live in hollywood perhaps to have the colored lights safety is key in the garden and if you've got steps steps at night really need to be lit that are going to be used a lot and you can build them into the treads you can have on the sides of the treads you can have them on the sides of the risers you can have a lantern nearby you could have a spotlight concealed running down at the planting perhaps at the side of the steps some people have lanterns on the piers of the step and that can be a really nice way lanterns generally i think are really nice but i find it very difficult to find economical good-looking lanterns but we did find one that was actually one that roald dahl had in an old house of his and we got it copied and i've used that on lots of jobs since and i get a man who makes them up for me um for just under 200 pounds which i think is quite good value and it's just a very traditional lamp but to find anything off the shelf that's anything as nice as that i struggle to to be honest and so i do tend to use those a lot because quite a few of the lanterns that you can buy are quite either really cheap looking and they don't last long or they're phenomenally expensive um and above many people's budgets but um things like a chandelier type lighting if you've got a little arbor or something like that or a little garden building and you regularly like to eat outside out there i think that can really transform a very monster in space into something really spectacular and there are outdoor chandelier lights now which you can use you could also use lighting to create shadows and often if you've got tall grasses or multi-stem tree trunks or things like that they really look beautiful especially if they're picked out on a nice wall or something like that and shadows in those cases are every bit as important as the light Light Fittings the actual look of the light fittings themselves i think is important and you can go and get really inexpensive ones from the sheds they do lots of them but i do find that they don't last very long um and they don't perhaps look the best but um some of them like the luxo lights are really the high end of the spectrum but they are brilliantly made and every time i work with an electrician that puts them in they say gosh you never want to work with any type of outdoor lights again because these are so superiorly manufactured and made and it is i think it is a question if you pay what you pay for is what you get really but they do them in a beautiful copper finish they do them in powder coated aluminium in blacks and things like that and the copper fades to a lovely sort of verde color and that is often the most popular but copper is becoming so expensive now they are becoming a little bit well even more expensive but it's a beautiful beautiful finish with light fittings once you've got the setup you want if you've got a small property then maybe you all have it on one switch and it all comes on when you turn it on or you might have it on a timer you might have some of it on a proximity light there are also things called the high low lights which you can keep on a very low light level generally and then when somebody comes they ramp up so you can see them and they can see you and i think those work well too or you can just have them on a timer or you can just have them on a manual switch and you can then divide the circuits up as to how you want them with a lot of buildings nowadays there's lots of glazing involved and that's lovely when you're inside in a room and you've got the lights on the problem is when it becomes dark it looks very black outside and that can be quite spooky because you can be sitting inside and you don't know if anybody's outside watching you and so that's another reason that a lot of people do have some gentle background lighting on in their garden because it just lights up that outdoor space it stops it looking black and spooky and it's just something really nice to look at and that's a very good reason i think for lighting up your garden so play around with the lighting big up your best features and transform your garden into a space that you can use 24 7.