Garden Lighting for Water Features
(Part 2)

part 1

Creating Dramatic Lighting Effects

"As with any kind of garden lighting, you want to get a feel for the overall aesthetic," advises Paul Segal, of Ray's Lighting in Pleasanton, CA. "We sit down with homeowners and try to determine the goal. The neat thing about water is that you can use its diffraction qualities to create some interesting motion effects, which move as the water moves through the lighting."

"I think that probably the most important thing is the drama," Segal continues, "how you can achieve the most effect with the fewest lights. The simpler, the better."

FX Luminaire's John Binkele agrees. "The key is restraint when you're designing for effect. You don't need a whole bunch of lights to make it work."

"When we design a water feature, we always try to include lighting," says Richard Cohen, of Cohen Landscape and Construction in Lake Forest, CA. "Sometimes it's lighting a basin that holds the water, or putting spotlights on spillovers, spillways and sheet flows. Sometimes we use fiber optic lighting in combination with sheet flows and the whole outline of a swimming pool. The idea is that if you're going to create a mood, with water sounds and so forth, you're going to also want that visual at night."

With the increasing amount of garden lighting options, only your imagination will limit the wide range of effects.

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