The Language of Landscape Lighting

Aug 16, 2022
The Language of Landscape Lighting
Master the process, lest you get lost in the weeds
By Janet Lennox Moyer

It gets dark every night. We lose our connection to our landscape spaces. Lighting designers have the gift to reconnect people to their personal space and to our public spaces. This is a big responsibility. As a senior citizen I am experiencing how difficult getting around in the dark becomes as our eyes’ capabilities decline. 

We are years into yet another new light source—this time LED. We have learned and adjusted to other new light sources previously. This one is more difficult. With electronics people entering our industry, we are losing important, intrinsic knowledge. Glare, which we had under control previously and rates as one of the key concerns for landscape lighting, is now rampant.

Landscape lighting is a different animal from interior lighting, with a different process. Today, unfortunately way too many people are providing landscape lighting with little or no knowledge. Lighting is both a left and right brain discipline. Landscape lighting requires us to understand power distribution and get it into a site early to avoid digging up a client’s gardens later.

We need to understand the plant materials being used—whether we plan to light them or not. We need to be able to visualize a landscape architect’s plans when the project is new construction. We need to understand how an existing landscape’s plants will change through the seasons of one year and over the years as the plants mature—and die. We need to be prepared for all kinds of small and radical changes to occur on a property over the life of a lighting system.

Well into my career, a radical change on a project forced me to restructure my design process. A planting wall was being built on a hillside between the house level and the pool level of the site. All contract documents were complete with two drawing sheets and multiple details of lighting for this wall. I got a call during construction from the electrical contractor who was trying to lay out the power in the multiple planting pockets but needed my help on-site. Meanwhile the landscape architect had been fired and the contractor building the planting wall did not build the pockets per the contract documents. There was no correlation between the wall and our drawings. We had to start over trying to draw the wall conditions. All light fixture symbols with the type ID, lamping, transformer number and control load number were removed. Now we only showed power, transformers and listed the type/quantity of fixtures that might be used at each location. All that contractors need to bid the project. 

That became my new standard for contract documents. Not planning the actual lighting layout and details for every location saves the client’s budget significantly. Until plants are placed, the number, location, fixture type and lamping cannot be known. During the construction phase, we mark up the CD plans in the field as we are locating either flags or the actual fixtures, with this information going directly to Record Documents.

We work with the arborists installing tree-mounted fixtures and contractors for structure-mounted fixtures. While they are busy with one task or another, we lay out the fixtures/flags for all locations at ground level. This moves a significant portion of fees from conceptual design or design development into the construction phase.

The aiming of the lighting involves moving fixtures, changing lamps, dimming fixtures with integrated dimming capability, changing beam spread of fixtures with flex beam capability, or changing drop-in lamps’ output and beam spread as necessary to create the desired effect. Landscape lighting is made up of layers of light brightness to create the balanced brightness hierarchy for the scene(s)—with all scenes blending together. Not having individual fixture dimming and flex beam means that we need to add screens (metal window screen cut to fit), sometimes as many as five per fixture, to balance the brightness of one, or more, fixtures with the scene.

Some people don’t go to projects at night to aim at all. This is a detriment to creating the night scene.

David Warfel started this “language” discussion of how we share information about lighting (LD+A February 2021). He gave us a list of his promises for the client. I want to give you a list of issues to include in organizing work needed for a landscape lighting project.

  1. Plan power distribution from the beginning to respond to all changes that will occur during design, construction and then throughout the life of the landscape.
  2. Study the plants, all of them, whether you light them or not. Understand their shape and size at planting and how they will grow and change throughout their life, their branching structure, leaf and trunk characteristics. This information guides how you light them, both uplighting and downlighting.
  3. Start your design by thinking downlighting, the direction of light from the sun making design elements look natural. Fixtures mounted above ground in trees or structures cover more area and require little maintenance as they are not knocked out of place for aiming and not grown over eliminating their lighting effects.
  4. Set up your fee structure for landscape lighting tasks including time on-site during construction to determine fixtures and flag their locations with fixture type, lamping, transformer and control load information or placing assembled/lamped fixtures; time to work with arborists and contractors for tree and building fixture placement including pre-aiming and setting glare shields.
  5. Include time in your fees for aiming and ensure that the team knows the help you require from the installing contractors to assist during the aiming process.
  6. Think about the maintenance tasks needed to ensure the integrity of the lighting scene(s) over the seasonal changes of one year and throughout all the changes of time. Provide a maintenance guideline and review it with the client or their property manager and the party responsible for providing that effort.

Late last year, I lit one tree for a client in Tucson. The next morning, she went out to her screened porch for her coffee. Her landscape was still the same, she loved it, but the night lighting is so much better. She can’t wait to see it again tonight.

That response has happened with so many projects. Landscape lighting, in the words of David Warfel, “affects the quality of human life.”