Landscape Lighting & Irrigation Design in Charlotte, NC

Lighting and irrigation are two different trades that often get bundled together because they both run wiring or piping through your yard before the mulch goes down. Landscape lighting covers path lights, uplighting on trees and facades, step lights, and low-voltage transformers wired to run on timers or smart controls. Irrigation design covers zoning a yard into sprinkler circuits, choosing drip lines versus spray heads for different plant beds, setting a controller to match Charlotte's clay soil and seasonal rainfall, and tying the whole system into a backflow preventer that meets local code.

Charlotte's mix of older neighborhoods with mature trees and newer subdivisions with fresh sod means the right approach varies a lot by property. A designer who mainly does new-construction sprinkler systems isn't automatically the right fit for uplighting a 40-year-old oak, and vice versa. When you're comparing firms, ask who pulls the permits and handles backflow testing, whether they design for your specific soil and drainage instead of using a generic zone count, what fixtures and controller brands they install (and whether parts are easy to source later), and how they price: flat bid versus time-and-materials, and what's covered if a line gets nicked by a future landscaping crew.

We scored the 8 businesses in this category on factors like scope of services, response time, licensing and permit handling, and how they price and warranty their work. See the full breakdown in our ranked guide to lighting and irrigation designers in Charlotte, or read our methodology for how we score every category.