Light plays a big role in the overall curb appeal of your home or business.  A well rounded landscape looks good, day or night in many kinds of weather.

Landscape lighting doesn't have to be expensive.  Modern solar technology makes putting lights anywhere inexpensive and easy.  

Landscape Lighting Basics:

• Well placed lights make a landscape more visually appealing and enhance safety
• Contrasting colors and shadow vs light add visual interest
• Using more, softer lights is better than fewer, harsher ones

Designing Your Landscape Lighting Plan

If you have a fundamentally good landscape design, lighting the landscape will be easy.  Here are some resources to get you started.

This site has some great landscape plans for free.  You just have to register.

Better Homes and Gardens

Our high-quality garden plan collection is designed to satisfy all your landscaping needs.

The University of Florida has a couple of great online resources to get you started.

 For landscaping basics this site is hard to beat.

Basic Principles of Landscape Design

Landscaping combines elements of art and science to create a functional, aesthetically pleasing extension of indoor living to the outdoors. One initial purpose of landscape design is to blend man's technology (house or building) into the natural surroundings. To work toward a desirable landscape design, the landscape horticulturist must have a working knowledge of art elements and design principles. This publication is intended for the commercial landscaper with little or no training in the use of these basic principles. This publication is not a complete landscape design text.

This is a slick web tool that gives you a broad variety of landscape types to chose from.  The tool then suggests plants to go into that landscape based on where in Florida the landscape is located. 

Florida Lanscape Selector  

There are some guidelines to consider for proper landscape design. Personal needs and tastes, existing plants, orientation and shape of the house and property, and location in the state all must be considered first. Then you are ready to select a design. The suggestions given in this program will provide a start for homeowners and landscapers when faced with the decision to design a front or back yard of a home, commercial landscape or condominium. Often people look to their neighbors and other surrounding landscapes for ideas; while this in itself is not a problem, mistakes are often repeated. This can create a design which is difficult to maintain or one that wastes resources.

This landscape design selector allows you to browse through photographs of 40 Florida landscapes representing front and back yards, and view the landscape plan in color on a computer screen. From here, you can view a photograph of any plant in the landscape plan simply by locating the mouse arrow on the letter representing a plant and clicking the mouse. An additional landscape plan for the same yard is also presented to allow you to select an optional design.

The 40 photographs of landscapes presented as part of this program were taken in north, central and south Florida. They represent a cross section of landscape types and sizes of homes. The principles shown for the home landscape are applicable to condominiums and commercial landscapes.

The plants suggested for each landscape design in this program must be evaluated for suitability to your site. Be sure that the sun, soil, exposure and drainage conditions of the specific areas of your site match the requirements of the plants. Some substitutions for the plants suggested by the program will almost always have to be made. These should be based on your evaluation of the site conditions on your property.

For the most part, plants are grouped together by water requirements; i.e. drought tolerant plants are located with other drought tolerant plants. Plants requiring more frequent irrigation are generally located close to a hose so that they can be hand watered. If you find that a plant which generally requires frequent irrigation is located in a drought tolerant plant grouping, either irrigate it by hand or supply it with a separate micro-irrigation head. Remember that micro-irrigation heads must be on a separate zone than the sprinkler-type heads. Another alternative would be to substitute a more drought tolerant plant.

The plant lists show the maximum desired height for each area of the design. If you make a substitution in the plant list, be sure that it grows to about the size of the plant which you replaced. You may purchase the Florida Plant Selector CD to help you choose a replacement.  The Florida Plant Selector can be found at http://it.ifas.ufl.edu/software/plantselector-cd.html  This will ensure that the spirit of the design remains intact.

Trees, shrubs and vines can be added to the design in appropriate areas to cast shade on east, south and west walls. Research has shown that this leads to significant energy savings in the building.