Superb outdoor garden lights

With the emphasis these days on the appearance of your home, cleverly utilised outdoor garden lights feature an effective way to imprint your personality on your garden.

Not to mention adding beauty and style. But it's not as simple as stringing up a few fairy lights and sticking a couple of lamps in the ground.

Amander Flaherty moved into lighting 20 years ago, after studying architecture, and now runs a successful lighting firm called Light on Landscape. Recently she has noticed an upsurge in the number of people looking to light up their outdoor spaces at night.

"The days of having a big open lawn with a clothes hoist in the middle and a few trees scattered around are gone," she says. "Smaller blocks mean more people are putting their resources into landscaping, whether that's a water feature, a sculpture, or outdoor lighting. They want to create their own little sanctuary."

Different lighting fixtures can be used outdoors

Accent lights can be spiked or wall mounted, but importantly, can be adjusted and aimed as you choose. That might be up a tree, into water or onto a landscape feature in your garden. In-ground lights, as the name suggests, sit in the lawn or driveway or paved surface and come in different materials, suitable for different conditions.

There are also a number of solar fittings available, but these are quite expensive to install effectively (unless you go for the simple fittings available at hardware stores, which tend not to put out a lot of light) and often require vast cabling set-ups and a back-up electricity supply to work at their best.

Amanda advises that anyone thinking about installing lighting in their outdoor spaces should talk to a professional lighting specialist, even if they're planning to do the job themselves.

"First of all it's important that people realise that it's not as easy as they make it out to be on TV," she says. "Often there are several stages in the process, such as soil preparation and laying pavers if you're going for in-ground lighting. You might have to hire equipment, but it starts getting expensive if you have to do that several times during the process."

And if you're landscaping a garden from scratch and planning to install lighting, involve your lighting professional right from the start. It will make everybody's job easier and help you to come up with the perfect lighting scheme for your garden.

Contact a landscape designer to find out more about outdoor garden lights: