Night lighting allows you to enjoy your landscape long after the sun has gone down.  It is an essential to the aesthetic of hardscape design, garden design, and outdoor architecture.  If you are planning outdoor events, light is also responsible for setting the mood for different areas of interest so your guests will get the most out of the experience.

Professional hardscape represent more than the creations of patios and simple walls.  Hardscape is used to sculpt the landscape.  It is a frame of sorts that works as a container for organic vitality.  Many hardscapes are made from high-grade materials, and they often feature very decorative designs that render their surfaces highly artistic by nature.

Night lighting brings out the distinctive beauty of these materials and designs.  Cut stone, polished marble, granite, flagstone, decorative concrete, and brick surfaces are just a few examples of materials whose distinguishing features justify the investment in illuminating their surface areas.  Patios, walkways, terraces, garden walls, courtyard flooring, and steps and stairways all come alive in a special way at night when they are illuminated.

Underwater lights also bring out the magic of water to an extent not even seen in the day time.  Water is the most perplexing of substances because it is inorganic in its own right, but the very foundation of everything organic.  Water bridges the realm of stone and structure and the realm of plants.  It also reaches out to the human realm and the mind of humanity, because the human body is 97 percent water.

When a fountain, natural pond, swimming pool, garden pond, or natural stream is lit up with underwater lighting, new colors appear in the lights that create new dimensions of movement.  This gives your water feature a transcendental quality not even seen during daytime hours.

In gardens and trees, night lighting creates a blend of shadow and light that accentuate the forms of vegetation.  Too much bright light on a plant will make it look flattened.  To do true justice to its form, you need a combination of up lights and down lights to bring out the varying heights of garden plants, the many shades of green, and the colors of flowers.

Lighting plants is only a part of lighting the entire garden.  Most gardens have transit areas that run through their interiors.  Smaller gardens have pathways which can be lit with simple low-level path lights.  Other gardens are much larger and have stone walkways that require more night lighting with decorative fixtures. 

These gardens also generally have an interior seating area, much like a courtyard that centers on a fountain or sculpture.  Again, all of these structures represent opportunities for unique outdoor lighting design that capture the essence of their form and highlight their functions as focal points of interest. 

For anyone planning outdoor events, night lighting is also the life of the party.  Gathering areas require layers of light that do different things for guests.  General lighting provides lighting for people to see and to move around.  Accent lighting brings out the decorative features of plants and manmade structures.  Specialty lighting fixtures are used to create special effects, such as the artificial moonlight under lighted trees.