Garden Lighting

Rating:
Summary: expert opinion
Review: At last, an up-to-date replacement for Ortho's 1984 "How to Design & Install Outdoor Lighting". This is a thorough overview of lighting techniques, system design and the variety of lamps and lampholders used in both line voltage and low voltage outdoor lighting. Despite the usual disclaimers (the Brits must be as litigious as Americans) about having only a qualified electrician install garden lighting there is useful information for the DIYer.

This is not an installer's manual but it does provide sufficient information to enable one to grasp the essentials of lighting design's dependence on the proper lamp type as the key to success. After all, lighting fixtures are just lamp holders and the effect is in the lamp not in the fixture. Many well-photographed illustrations of lighting techniques are provided with explanatory captions and backed up with colored drawings to reveal detail. I was surprised to see charts of lamp types drawn out-of-scale but there were accompanying photographs to put them back in perspective. Credits were in source order so it is difficult to track a photo to its source i.e. if you want to know who was responsible for a photo on page 107 you have to scan the entire acknowledgements section. No equipment credits are given although some of the photos look like catalog pix and the experienced eye will detect products not currently available in the US. The book cover shown above is not the cover on the book I received which shows a rather pedestrian garden walkway with pagoda (!) lights and a faucet and coiled garden hose instead of the sumptuous Japonisme entry.