Look at the photographs of our own work and most of them are taken after dark. That is not a stylistic choice. It is when these gardens are being used, and it is when they look like what they cost.
The logic is simple enough that it is easy to miss. From roughly May to October nobody in this county chooses to be outside in the afternoon — it is thirty-two degrees, the humidity is at ninety percent, and the terrace is in full sun. People go out after six. So a yard built without lighting is a yard whose owners see it in daylight through a window, from inside the air conditioning, and stand in it only in the dark, where it is a black shape. Adding light does not decorate the garden; it is what makes the garden available.
What actually gets lit is a shorter list than people expect, and more is emphatically not better. A yard with a fixture every four feet reads as a runway, and the eye has nothing to rest on. Three jobs are worth doing. Uplight the specimens that have a form worth seeing — a shaped standard, a topiary spiral, a multi-trunk palm, a good trunk with texture on it. Wash the vertical surfaces that make the space feel enclosed, which usually means a hedge wall or a garden wall; light on a vertical surface is what makes a small garden feel like a room rather than a dark hole. And light the ground people walk on, at a low level, spaced widely enough that you get pools of light and dark rather than an even runway strip.
What not to light: the whole lawn, the fence line, and anything at eye level pointing back at where people sit. Glare is the single most common fault we are called out to fix, and it is almost always a fixture aimed a few degrees too high, or a beam too wide for what it is lighting. It is a five-minute correction and it transforms a yard that felt harsh.
On hardware — go low voltage, and go solid. Twelve-volt with a transformer is safe to work around, safe to run in shallow trench, easy to extend later, and the fittings can be moved as planting grows. Solar path lights are tempting and they are a false economy in this climate: they are dim by design, they fail in the wet season when there is no charge and you most want them, and the batteries are dead inside two years. Brass and copper fittings weather rather than corrode, which matters within a mile of salt water — on Key Biscayne, Miami Beach or the east side of Hollywood, painted aluminium fittings will be pitted and leaking within a season or two.
The best argument for doing it during the build rather than later is purely practical. Cable is laid in twenty minutes while the beds are open and the stone has not gone down. Retrofitting the same run afterwards means lifting stone, cutting through a planted bed and putting it all back, and it costs two or three times as much for exactly the same result. If the budget is tight, we lay the cable and the sleeves during the build and fit half the lights — the expensive, disruptive part is done, and the rest is a Saturday afternoon whenever you are ready.
One last thing worth saying to neighbours: aim it down and keep it warm. Twenty-seven-hundred kelvin looks like light, five-thousand looks like a car park, and a fixture aimed over the property line is somebody else's bedroom window.
MariErich Landscaping & Design designs and installs low-voltage garden lighting across Miami Springs, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Kendall, Key Biscayne, Weston and Hollywood. Free estimates — call (786) 985-5921.