Book Reviews: A Review Of My Landscape Lighting Library
Welcome to my library. I like to own books and try to read them after I buy them. All too often, I’ll buy a book, scan the photos and their captions and then put the book on my shelf where they all look pretty. Not counting the catalogues, my landscape lighting section is now eleven inches wide and really quite nice looking. Last year, I decided that it was time for me to actually read all of my books. Seemed a good idea, but I knew that I would need some goal to help me along with the task. That’s when I decided to write up what I thought about each book and to offer it to the members of this young industry as a guide.
I have intentionally not included self-published books, written by a manufacturer, that are clearly intended to promote a single line of landscape lighting equipment. I keep those books among my catalogues where they are most welcome.
It’s easy to find the books I reviewed; click on the blue ISBN number and follow the links until you find the book. All are available from on-line bookstores and most are affordable.
I’ve had fun creating this guide and I hope it serves a purpose. If it stimulates a little discussion and others wish to offer exceptions to my judgments, so much the better for all of us. E-mail me your comments and I will add them to the review as I have time. Just like the newspaper, I will edit for grammar, spelling and to remove any too expressive terms.
2010: I’ve reviewed the reviews and have responded where I believe changes or additions were deserved. Many of the revisions came from your suggestions and I thank you for your feedback.
Tom Williams
- Understanding Garden Design
- Vanessa Gardner Nagel, APLD | Portland, Oregon | Timberline Press | 2010 | 978-0-88192-943-0
“Why Design a Garden? Think about the projects you do in your life. Sew a dress, build a house, take a trip-these activities usually succeed because of the planning you do before the experience. Planning and design are intention and purpose. They give a project significance.” And so begins one of the most useful books I’ve yet found for the novice, or even advanced, Landscape Lighting Designer. The Author, Vanessa Gardner Nagel, has drawn on her focused study and practice of Interior Design, a later deep exploration of Landscape Design, and a particularly illuminating “light bulb” moment. Mrs. Nagel “saw the light” when she realized that all the books on landscape design begin with a discussion of the Principles Of Design without addressing the much deeper question, “Why Design?”
In my review of Jan Moyer’s 2nd edition of the Landscape Lighting Book, I noted, “Once you understand the theory behind the short cuts and rules-of-thumb that other How-To books offer, you are free to create your own. With the freedom you gain when you understand and can apply those fundamental principals and concepts to your landscape lighting, you become like the cook who ignores the printed recipe and creates a masterpiece of culinary art.”
I believe Understanding Garden Design offers a second route into our exploration of landscape lighting design; a deeper understanding of the processes and goals of our fellow professional colleagues who visualize and create the spaces we light. In authoring a book that focused on “Understanding” the why behind landscape design, Nagel has opened a window into the processes of our closest allies in our professional endeavors. When we are able to understand and appreciate what the Landscape Designer’s intentions were, we become fully informed and potentially more creative Designers of Light.
THE BONUS CHAPTER for all landscape lighting designers, experienced and novice, is Chapter 9: Garden Lighting. Her chapter on Landscape Lighting is the most lucid introduction to the craft I’ve found yet. During my second review of my copy of her text, I found I had previously penciled in numerous !!s and ☺s. There is good stuff for all of us in this book. Many copies on the web from $21.95 used.
- Landscape Lighting Design Book
- ASL Landscape Design Institute. et al., editors | München, Germany | Callwey Georg D.W. GmbH | 1998 ISBN 4-901105-00-0 (Japan) ISBN 3-7667-1346-9 (Germany)
The soft-cover Landscape Lighting Design Book is a bonanza of excellent color photographs of landscape lighting designs from all over the world. It was published by a German Publisher, printed in Japan and offers both English and Japanese text. It features a lengthy interview of Janet Lennox Moyer. Ms. Moyer is allowed to simply talk about her experience in and with light. The great majority of the photographs are of her designs and many are in color for the first time in print.
This is a book intended for people who are interested in “the relationship of lighting with architectural space as well as outdoor space.” It’s not a “how to” for the DIY crowd; it’s a “what can be” for any seeking to take their designs to another level.
- Garden Lighting, Contemporary Exterior Lighting
- James Davidson | London | The Orion Publishing Group | 1999 | ISBN 0-7063-7778-8
This book offers a lot of useful information for the DIYer and any professional installer who wants to sharpen their lighting design skills. Davidson offers a number of skillfully drawn and illustrated plans and sections of various installations. He is aware that glare will destroy even the best designs and often includes the human form in the drawings. He reminds us that we want humans to be in and move about our designs. Unfortunately, the photos are the weakest element of this book. Almost all of the exposures were made too early in the evening for the lighting designs to be fully revealed.
Mr. Davison is British, as are other of the authors I’ve included. This fact is particularly interesting when he launches into his discussion of lighting the typically very small English Front Garden. This author loves light and understands its limitations. “Remember, too, that the front garden is a semi-public place and you must take care to avoid the lighting causing a nuisance to neighbors or passing traffic.” Good advice on both sides of the pond.
In addition, his nationality means that much of his electrical advice doesn’t apply in North America.
- Indoor and Outdoor Lighting Solutions
- Ortho Books (author), Larry Johnston (editor) | Des Moines, Iowa | Meredith Books | 2003 | ISBN 0-89721-475-7
This Ortho paperback is not the long hoped-for replacement for the Ortho 1984 publication How to Design & Install Landscape Lighting. The information about interior lighting is accurate if superficial. It may be useful reading for the consumer who is considering a major indoor lighting project; a close reading will give them the some terminology to use when meeting with a lighting professional to describe what they want. The section on energy efficiency offers some of the best advice on saving energy there is. “Turning off lights when you do not need them… will save energy.”
Beware of the photographs used throughout. The editor clearly misunderstood how to use photographs to illustrate the effects of designed lighting in interior spaces. In almost every case, the 30+ photographers represented in this book, have used floodlights to light the lighting (yes, that is what I mean). When floodlight is added an already lighted room, the photographers’ goal is to reduce the “contrast ratio” to get “well-exposed” photographs. This “filling” of shadow with floodlight results in the loss of most of the useful visual information about the lighting design contained in the photographs. The photographs are visually flat and uninteresting.
The single good landscape lighting photograph is a reprint from the 1984 Ortho book and reproduced smaller here. The photograph is credited to Michael McKinley.
- Lighting: Exteriors & Interiors
- Wanda Jankowski | Glen Cove, New York | PBC International, Inc. | 1993 | ISBN 086636-237-1
Published in 1993, this lovely book is filled with photos of major projects that at first appear to offer very little for the residential landscape lighting designer. In fact, it has many beautifully lighted facades and they are what we often find ourselves doing for our clients. The solutions these designers found for lighting public monuments and corporate headquarters will translate into smaller scale designs in our practices. It also includes a two-page spread of Ross De Alessi’s lighting of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts for which he won the coveted Edison award. Douglas Salin’s photograph may be the most beautiful photo ever taken of a public building at night. Age makes it very affordable now.
- The Landscape Lighting Book
- Janet Lennox Moyer | Hoboken, New Jersey | John Wiley & Sons | 1992 | ISBN 0-471-52726-2 – same ISBN as the second edition below
This is the most essential book for your professional library, with the exception of the second edition listed just below. The only possible advantage in buying the 1st edition now is that it may be a little less expensive. Other than that, you should own and read the second edition.
- The Landscape Lighting Book 2nd Ed.
- Janet Lennox Moyer | Hoboken, New Jersey | John Wiley & Sons | 2005 | ISBN 0-471-52726-2
The second edition of Janet Lennox Moyer’s The Landscape Lighting Book is an absolute necessity for everybody who works in landscape lighting or who is seriously interested in creating their own garden lighting. Ms. Moyer has greatly revised and expanded the color plates and Chapter 4, “The Design Process - Documenting and Installing Landscape Lighting” as well as writing an entirely new Chapter 5 “Follow-up Work - Record Documents and Project Maintenance.” These changes and additions and the many other updates make the new edition well worth the purchase price.
First published in 1992, The Landscape Lighting Book has served as the single and indispensable reference for the landscape lighting industry. It has offered all new landscape lighting practitioners guidance and provided an emerging industry the foundation necessary on which to build solid practice. While there is a wealth of other books that offer how-to help and publish pretty pictures, none of them even attempt to define and explain professional practice for the landscape lighting industry with Ms. Moyer's authority and confidence.
The Landscape Lighting Book is not an easy book to read but it is well worth the effort. Once you understand the theory behind the short cuts and rules-of-thumb that other how to books offer, you are free to create your own. With the freedom you gain when you understand and can apply those fundamental principals and concepts to your landscape lighting, you become like the cook who ignores the printed recipe and creates a masterpiece of culinary art.
- Lighting the Landscape: Art Design Technologies
- Roger Narboni | Basel, Switzerland | Birkhäuser | 2004 | ISBN 3-7643-7079-3
This is an art book for landscape lighting designers to dream over. There are many wonderful photographs of large-scale projects from Europe and Asia and is well worth what you will pay for it. Ask for it as a birthday present.
- Creative Garden Lighting
- Michèle Osborn | Portland, Oregon | Timber Press | 2005 | ISBN 0-88192-742-2
Another picture book but this one is a nightmare. The photographer knows nothing about what landscape lighting should look like and appears to be afraid of the dark. There is value in this book if it is to only remind you how annoying 15 unshielded pathlights, 5 glaring sconces, 3 security lights and miscellaneous over bright interior lighting can be in an otherwise beautiful garden. This photo is featured as a two-page spread on pages 24 & 25. This is not creative garden lighting! It is a photograph filled with uncontrolled GLARE.
Note added in 2010: As I reviewed each of the books I originally reviewed in 2006, I paused and wondered if I had been too hard on Ms. Osborn’s for the use of Steven Wooster’s photographs.
I reviewed Mr. Wooster’s credentials and discovered that he is one of our most prolific garden photographers and has supplied photographs for about 40 garden books. His day-lighted work is lovely and some the nighttime images are interesting examples of the art of photography. But these are not photographs of Landscape/Garden Lighting.
I continue to believe his photographs of, perhaps lovely, lighted gardens at or near twilight completely misses the intent of photographing quality lighting designs executed to illuminate the landscape AT NIGHT. Should any young landscape lighting designer or aspiring garden owner seek to recreate the totally unshielded and glaring use of garden lighting featured throughout this book, they will fall terribly short of acceptable modern practice.
Mr Wooster should take the time to discover where and when George Gruel is next presenting his talk, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.” I would strongly urge him (and you, dear reader) to find out how Mr. Gruel creates his lovely NIGHTTIME photos of outdoor lighting designs.
I don’t believe I was too strong in my dislike for portions of this book in 2006. But, I do believe there exists enough interesting information in a number of the photographs to make it worthwhile to own and study.
Remember: Lamp and reflector brightness is NOT decorative. Any visible “source brightness” is GLARE and will degrade the viewers night vision. The viewer will not be able to distinguish subtleties you have included in your lighting design. GLARE IS NOT ACCEPTABLE IN THE LANDSCAPE.
- Garden Lighting: Design, Inspiration, Techniques
- John Raine | San Diego, California | Laurel Glen Publishing | 2001 | ISBN 1-57145-692-9
Mr. Raine is obviously a very talented landscape lighting designer who has thought deeply about how he can share his knowledge of and experience with light in the landscape. His choice of the subtitle “design – inspiration – techniques” is both accurate and misleading.
This book is very long on design inspiration: many good photos, thoughtful discussion of design issues, and a number of useful tables. My favorite table is his list of favorite plants with notes on how to light them. His chapter on Garden-lighting Effects is filled with excellent examples and graphics while the Lighting Garden Features chapter reveals the depth of his experience. The many good photographs help ease the reader through the difficulty of reading about an experience that is essentially visual.
The weaknesses of his book are in the technical. His definitions of lighting terms are brief and occasionally just odd. He has difficulty deciding if the thing we use to make the light is a lightbulb, bulb or a lamp. There are also errors in several of his other wise useful tables that appear to simply be the result of haste or poor editing. Considering current practice, I think the omission of any mention of the PAR 36, its strengths and weaknesses, is unfortunate.
These technical difficulties may seem insignificant when compared to the many successes the balance of the book offers the general reader and in some ways, they are. The issue is that for lighting designers talk to other designers, we must have a common terminology. Mr. Raine has not helped us with our language problem. Talking about light is difficult at best. When one of our finest authors cannot decide what to call the device that lies at the heart of our art and craft – the lamp – we continue to have a problem with communication.
- Garden Lighting For Outdoor Entertaining: 40 Festive Projects
- Chris Rankin | New York, New York | Lark Books | 2001 | ISBN 1-57990-319-3
This is one of two books with slightly different names and identical text. It is a soft cover picture book and suggests many ways to not use electric lighting out of doors (lots of candles). I think I paid $15.00 for it and am glad that I read the amazon.com review before I bought the second book. The second title is Creative Lighting for Outdoor Living: 40 Festive Projects, again, by Chris Rankin. The only difference is the cover photo on this hard cover edition.
- The Art of Outdoor Lighting: Landscape with the Beauty of Lighting
- Randall Whitehead | Gloucester, Massachusetts | Rockport Publishers | 2001 | ISBN 1-56496-818-9
This is another picture book for landscape lighting designers to dream over. The photos on pages 1 through 157 are well worth your study; they are designs by many of the best landscape lighting professionals we have. The secret of this book is in the last chapter, “Common Mistake in Outdoor Lighting.” Along with the Q & A at the end, this chapter is filled with common sense advice that you may have never thought of. This was not a cheap book when I bought it and it was entirely worth the price of my admission then. The really good news is that it is now available as a paperback and about 1/2 the hard cover price.
- How to Design and Install Outdoor Lighting
- Ortho Books, William H. Wilson, Michael D. Smith (editor) | San Francisco, California | Ortho Books | 1984 | ISBN 0-89721-026-3
This is the classic landscape lighting handbook. It is dated and out-of-print but may be still the most readable “how to” book out there. It offers great photos, good design advice and a very dated text. The world of low-voltage lighting has changed in many ways, MR16 and multi-tap transformers just to mention two. ‘Nuff said about that. Several paperback copies on the web from $5.00
My “Clever Use of the Ortho Book” Award is given to FX Luminaire who used the softcover book’s photos to identify which of their luminaire line could reproduce the effects in the book. It strikes me that a honest effort to attempt the challenge and recreate those effects would offer excellent training for a new landscape lighting designer. I’m certain the new designer would have a much greater understanding of the difficulty to do it well vs do it quickly by the end of the exercise.
(This is not intended to be an endorsement of FX Products, only its’ well designed online catalogue)
That two-page photograph I mentioned in the new Ortho book is presented here on pages 10 and 11 and is credited to Harry A. White, Lighting Design. It’s a mystery. Does anybody out there have an answer?
Update added in 2010: We do have an answer and it came from Jim Boyd of Boyd Lighting Designs, San Antonio, Texas. Jim “made some calls around Texas” and reported that “Harry White was a partner in a San Antonio based landscape firm named ‘Morris and White’ which is no longer in business. Mr. Morris has passed away and Mr. White is long retired... A past employee of Morris & White confirmed that the design is by Harry White and the photographer was Michael McKinley. And both attributions are accurate.” Thank you Jim!
- Complete Lighting Design: A Practical Design Guide
- Marilyn Zenlinsky-Syarto | Gloucester, Massachusetts | Quarry Books | 2006 | ISBN 1-59253-247-0
This is one of the newer additions to my landscape lighting design library and contains excellent photos of outdoor lighting design work by Randall Whitehead, Janet Lennox Moyer and Mark Carlson.
The Article by Jan Moyer titled “An Outdoor Destination” is particularly impressive. Ms. Moyer discusses her design process and goals for lighting two “outdoor rooms”. The photographs are excellent and the commentaries that accompany each photo are very helpful. The inclusion of daytime photos of each scene discussed is an outstanding object lesson about the transformative properties of light. Rarely do we find detailed and accessible design commentary such as this. The instructional potential of the combination of photos and well-written commentary is outstanding.
Following the Moyer article, George Gruel demonstrates that he is able to “mock-up” accurately and artistically a “lighted” view of a garden starting with a daytime photograph. His accomplishment is astounding and has the potential to be a very powerful sales tool.
In addition to her thoughtful introductory comments on the difficulty of designing excellent lighting for Outdoor Spaces, Ms. Zenlinsky-Syarto includes quotes Mark Carlson thoughts on the matter. As if these gifts were not enough, the reader will be rewarded to find there are two very informative articles by Mr. Carlson titled “A Play of Light and Shadows” and “Techniques of the Trade”.
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