Lighting

Gerry Feeny does lighting design for gardens.

In a previous incarnation (some two or three decades gone) he was active in the film business and collected many credits and awards for his cinematography.

Until, as he puts it, he got 'burned out'.

Picture on the right shows him on the salt flats of the Puna, Northern Argentina, during the shooting of a feature called Veronico Cruz. in 1988.

Gerry today takes great delight in creating night time magical environments for gardens.

"The garden is one thing by day but can be quite another by night." he says."It is like a new dimension of space that until you have it, you never believed it could exist.

Lighting firstly needs to be functional, so you need to establish waymarkers to see what's important and where you are going, but after that you are painting a picture that somehow invokes the underworld. I never forget a great saying by the lighting cameraman, Nestor Almendros, that he does not lighten, he darkens...this has never been more true than when it comes to a garden. "

One enemy of good lighting (and there are many) is security lighting, which utterly destroys any mysterious ambience whatsoever.. Gerry believes that you can just as well deter burglars by putting subtle lighting schemes on a PIR detector instead. "If it comes on you are alerted whether or not it's a glaring security spotlight. And if you are asleep it makes no difference".

Costs:

Gerry charges 20% on top of the total cost (electrical labour and all materials) of a lighting install to cover his design and organising work. He uses a dedicated garden lighting company S&K Electrics to do the installation. He will charge around £300 upfront for getting things going. He prefers to use lights from Hunza or John Cullen for their quality and durability and is always interested in cold cathode, LEDs and neon for their special qualities. However these are expensive luminaries. For a scheme involving ten conventional exterior lights things usually work out to around £2 to 3k.