When you light up a landscape you create a whole, magical world that invites you to explore the garden after dark. Lighting can make your home glow in a world of its own, make passageways decorative and safe to negotiate in the dark, turn your yard into a cheerful party or dinner locale, or entice you out to a nighttime retreat in your own backyard.

Once upon a time, lighting was limited to full-voltage flood lights that were difficult for design effects and ate up great chunks of electricity. Today you have a wide range of eco-friendly lighting options including low voltage, solar and LCD. All these offer different types of lighting with interesting selections of  features and designs. Some may look like table lamps, others like candles. Some can be spot lights, hung from above to bathe areas with light, or others can be hidden behind interesting shaped plants or objects that will become silhouetted when back-lit. There are styles of lamps perfect to dangle from above and styles fabricated to run in long, flexible strips of tiny LCD lights so you can draw outlines in sparkling color.

Use a combination of lighting forms to paint your own nighttime picture. Remember to make passageways glow so people can see where they are stepping. Add the brightest lights at an attention-getting focal point and in areas where people will gather. And slip in subtle lighting like the small, soft shine from solar lamps in clusters to gently underscore an area of colorful flowers, or trail them up the path of a curving hillside stairway.

Lighting can make  your property into a piece of glowing art work once the sun sinks below the horizon. A well-lit garden will look like an entirely different location than it does during the day. So light up your garden with low voltage, solar and LCD effects. You will want to use your space outdoors as much during the night hours as during the day. And when being outdoors is not as comfortable as your lighting makes it look, you can always enjoy looking at your garden at night from indoors. The light-sculptured garden will make your windows and glass doors show off  your garden like fine art paintings.