Lighting is the easiest thing to overdo in a garden, because every fitting looks reasonable on its own. One more spike light here, a string of festoon there, an uplighter on every tree — none of it looks wrong in the catalogue. Put it all in the same garden and it reads like a car park forecourt, not somewhere you'd want to sit. A garden lit everywhere is worse than a garden not lit at all. The craft in a lighting scheme isn't in how much you install. It's in what you leave dark.
What lighting is actually for
Strip away the trends and a garden scheme is doing one of three jobs: it extends the hours a garden gets used, it marks a route safely — steps, changes of level, the edge of a terrace — or it draws the eye to one thing worth looking at after dark. That's it. A fitting that isn't doing one of those three is decoration, and decoration is where a scheme gets noisy. We talk more about lighting as part of a garden built to be used, not just photographed, in our piece on designing a garden for summer — done well, lighting alone can add two or three hours to a warm evening.
The rule of three
Before we spec a scheme, we pick three things in the garden worth lighting — usually a change of level, a specimen plant or tree, and the edge of the space people sit in — and we light only those, with intent. Everything else stays dark and lets the three fittings do the work. It's a small discipline that stops a scheme creeping from three lights to fifteen, which is how every overlit garden we've seen got that way: one more fitting felt like a small addition each time, until nothing was left in shadow and the whole effect went flat. Shadow is doing as much work as the light in a scheme that reads well — it's what gives the lit things somewhere to stand out against.
In practice that might mean a strip along the step from a raised terrace, an uplighter on a multi-stem tree that's earned its place in the planting plan, and a line along the edge where lawn meets patio so the boundary reads clearly after dark. Three decisions, each with a job, rather than a fitting wherever there happened to be a socket.
Recessed strips
A low-voltage LED strip recessed into a step nosing or run along a paving edge is the fitting we use most, because it lights the ground without ever putting a visible fitting in the frame by day. On the Warsash hardscape, a recessed line runs the full perimeter of the lawn and Astro insert — one continuous detail rather than a row of individual spikes — and it's what carries the whole evening scheme on its own.
Two things decide whether it works. The colour temperature has to sit warm — around 2700K — or a garden reads clinical rather than calm after dark. And the run has to be planned before the paving goes down, not after, because the cable and the recess both live in the sub-base. That's a decision made at the same stage as the depth of the MOT Type 1 and the fall of the patio, which is exactly why what happens under the slab matters for more than drainage. Retrofitting a strip into a finished patio means cutting into a surface you've just paid to have laid properly. Ask for it at the brief stage instead.
Everything we spec runs on low-voltage, fed from a single transformer rather than mains cable buried at every fitting — safer in wet ground, and it means the whole scheme can be re-run or added to later without breaking back into a finished patio. IP68-rated for anything below ground or standing in water in a downpour, which in Hampshire is most winters.
Fence-panel uplighters
A handful of small, low-voltage uplighters set at the base of a fence line does more for the feel of a garden after dark than most people expect, because it gives the space a backdrop and a sense of depth instead of a flat black wall where the boundary used to be. The fitting itself should disappear in daylight — a spike or a small surface unit, nothing that reads as garden furniture when the sun's up. If you can see the fitting at noon, it's the wrong one.
Where most schemes go wrong
The most common mistake isn't the number of fittings — it's mixing colour temperatures and letting decorative extras creep in. A cool white spike light next to a warm strip reads as two different gardens stitched together, not one considered scheme. Coloured or colour-changing fittings are worse again: they turn a garden into event lighting, which is fine for one evening a year and wrong for the other three hundred and sixty-four. We spec everything on a scheme to the same warm white, and we leave the colour-changing options on the shelf. A garden isn't a stage.
What it costs, and why less is usually more
Done properly, a lighting scheme isn't cheap — IP-rated fittings for a wet climate, a transformer sized correctly, cable run and buried at the right stage, not bodged in afterwards. But the honest version costs less than people expect, because the restraint is doing real work for the budget as well as the look. Three fittings specified properly, wired once at the sub-base stage, and forgotten, beat fifteen cheap spike lights bought later to try and fix a garden that still goes dark and flat every evening. If you're planning a build and want the evening thought about from the start, raise it in the brief — it's a five-minute conversation at that stage and a much bigger one later. Send a brief through here and I'll come and take a look.