A Word about Lighting

If you scroll down to the pictures of exterior lighting you’ll assume that the reason any of us want lighting is to provide light–lots and lots of light. But as Richard V. Morse says in this article, light is a means to an end. You want to read, or you want to see the fish in the aquarium or you want to highlight the china in the cabinet, or you want to put on your makeup. And in each of those cases there’s good lighting and bad lighting.

For exterior lighting, the reasons are usually safety–so you don’t trip on your way from the car to the front door; security–so bad guys can’t hide in the shadows; enjoyment–you can use your outdoor spaces when it’s dark out; beauty–highlighting your garden features.

Since the following pictures have no landscape lighting at all, I’ll leave discussion of “beauty” to another post. (It’s hard to show up beautiful garden structure and features if this is what the garden is fighting.) For now let’s just see how the existing lighting meets any of the four purposes. These are all within walking distance of my home:

Looks like an architectural version of a skunk! Or a zebra? Or that little boy in Addams Family! Referred to here as the “spaceship effect”!

Actually, the only house of the collection that does have an element of landscape lighting–illuminating the house number on the boulder. There’s so much light that safety and security are adequately dealt with, but it’s so sharp, it wouldn’t invite lingering out in the garden.

This isn’t photo-shopped–it really is that bright!

Another property with such sharp light/dark contrast you’d seldom choose to take an evening stroll in the garden. The fence/wall in front hides the front yard, so one can’t tell what shadows exist there, but for sure there’s no other landscape lighting, and even if there were, it would be completely eclipsed by the house lighting. One of the (many) problems with this degree of brightness is that it leaves the shadows extra dark. So it doesn’t necessarily meet the security need as well as might be assumed. I’m not sure why soffit lighting has become so popular, but it does nothing to beautify the home (imho).