Learn how to incorporate lighting into your lawn to not only increase safety, but to add ambience and highlight attractive features, as well
Creatively incorporated landscape lighting does more than enhance the safety and security of your property. It can transform your lawn area into an elegant nightscape for entertaining, quiet evenings with a loved one, or just for admiring from inside the house.
Before investing in an expensive lighting system, consider what you want to accomplish with your lawn lighting. If all you need is basic safety lighting, then installing accent lighting along the paths and the contours of the lawn may be enough. If you want enough light to extend outdoor activities like sports games into the evening hours, simple floodlighting will meet your needs. For the more aesthetically conscious, though, lighting can be incorporated into the lawn in ways that dramatically highlight major plantings and lawn decor or light up the whole area to enhance, rather than wash out, color and detail.
Lighting essentials
For safety re
asons, features like paths and steps should be lit even if you’re not interested in the aesthetic appeal. Fortunately, this type of lighting is some of the most attractive made, with fixtures in available in flower forms and abstract shapes as well as the standard mushroom shape, which makes it easier to develop an appealing design. Because shaded path lights don’t cause glare that can reduce visibility, mushrooms lights with large shades are preferred for path lighting. Another option is to place partially shaded mushroom lights in shrubs where the foliage will filter the light and reduce glare.
If you have a large lawn or long paths, installing light fixtures at regular intervals can make the garden path look about as elegant as an airport runway. The alternative is to place three or four spotlights high above the lawn in a tree or on the roof and aim the light beams onto the path. This will cast light over a broad area without the airstrip look or clutter that rows of individual lights can create.
Other relatively basic lighting techniques can also have a major impact. On lawns or flowerbeds with curving edges, contour lighting can reveal the lawn’s arcing lines and produce a dynamic, flowing appearance. To create this effect, place low mushroom or tier lights around the edges of the part of the lawn or flowerbed to be emphasized.
To illuminate a large area of the lawn, such as an outdoor activity area, down lighting with spotlights or floodlights is ideal. Installing down lights overhead in trees, under eaves, or on tall garden structures like gazebos is a simple way to cast light over a large area. To avoid washing the color and detail out of the lawn, position the lights so that their beams fall in overlapping circles for a more natural layered effect.
Moonlighting is another, subtler method of lighting an area from above. In this technique, spotlights or floodlights are mounted in the branches of a large tree to illuminate both the ground and the tree itself as the light filters down through the leaves like moonlight. While down lighting alone is enough to create this effect, ground lighting improves visibility while adding more light for the interplay of shadows.
Low shrubbery in the lawn offers another opportunity for the creative use of lighting. Tall mushroom lights or spread lights can be used to cast limited circles of light over ground cover and low shrubs. For low-growing plantings, use shaded fixtures to prevent glare. Partially shaded fixtures can be installed in taller shrubbery, where the greater amount of light will set off the foliage and the foliage, in turn, will reduce the glare.
Special lighting effects
Although basic lighting effects can be attractive by themselves, it’s the more advanced lighting techniques that make the difference between a simple lighted lawn and a nightscape in which the most distinctive elements of the lawn are used to their fullest. These methods let you incorporate lighting into the lawn in ways that bring out the character of textured surfaces, mimic moonlight, or highlight features like sculptures and specimen shrubs.
To create gentle ambient lighting, a technique called background lighting can be used to cast diffused illumination over a limited area. Up lights are placed at the bottom of a wall, fence, or large trellis and aimed upward to create a radiant backdrop that also adds visual depth to the landscape.
Grazing is another method of bringing ambient light to the lawn. This technique involves casting light across a stone or brick wall or even across a trellis or a line of trees to bring out the detail of the textured surface. Shaded up lights or spotlights with wide beams are placed near the subject and a beam of light is directed across the subject’s surface.
Accent lighting is the most popular method of highlighting art objects and small to medium-sized flowerbeds. Accent light fixtures are small and can provide only limited illumination, but they make up for it in looks. Designs range from natural shapes meant to blend in with the landscape to showy pieces that are decorative in their own right. There are even light fixtures made of real granite and marble stones hollowed out and fitted with lights. In addition to the common freestanding fixtures, there are fixtures designed to be attached to posts or walls.
If your lawn includes an unusually shaped tree, shrub or statue, up lighting by directing light from the base of the object upwards can create an especially dramatic effect. To prevent the glare that could easily occur with this method, choose shaded fixtures and place them behind the object, aimed away from the most common viewing point.
Spotlighting, a technique similar to up lighting, can also be used to highlight interesting elements. With this method, spotlights or floodlights are mounted overhead and aimed down onto the object. To highlight a sculpture or statue in a way that brings out all three dimensions, two light beams can be focused on the object from several directions in a technique called cross lighting.
Truly unusual shapes in the lawn, such as intricately twisted trees or abstract art sculptures, offer two excellent nightscaping opportunities: silhouetting and shadowing. In the first technique, the object’s silhouette is brought out by placing spotlights or up lights concealed in the ground around the object or placed directly behind it and aimed upward. With the second method, the object is lit from the front so that its shadow is cast onto a wall or other flat surface.
If you’re looking for a way to add depth to a small lawn, try perspective lighting. This technique adds a sense of dimension by focusing attention on a specific line of site. The foreground is gently lit with lights running along the line of sight, while a brighter light is aimed at a focal point at the end of the line of sight, making the end appear farther away. For example, a light beam might be focused down a line of trees or a path and focus on an end point like a statue or small tree.
More than just making your property safer, using a variety of techniques to incorporate lighting into your lawn can create ambience and drama for evening gatherings with friends, show off focal points, and add a sense of dimension to the landscape. With the right combination of lighting techniques, your lawn can be as attractive by night as it is by day.
If you’ve installed a home alarm system and are curious as to how you can raise the level of home security a bit more consider adding lights to your home’s exterior. It is a rather simple way, though the complexity can vary, to increase the level of visibility on your property and therefore decrease the likelihood that your home will become the target of a burglary.
Lighting goes a long way to making your home less attractive to potential burglars. When a home and the yard, both front and back, are well lit a burglar is less inclined to target your home. For obvious reasons, burglars do not like being seen when completing their crimes. Lighting on your home’s exterior is a real practical way to give your home exactly what potential criminals don’t want. Depending on the complexity of your lighting system, the price for installation and maintenance will vary. Here are a few pointers when equipping your home with a good exterior lighting system to supplement the home security system you already have in place.
Start a budget. With all the choices you will have, you want to set out a preliminary budget beforehand so you don’t overspend. Lighting systems can range from inexpensive to some of the most costly expenses your home will have.
It is highly recommended that you go with durable exterior lighting over merely something that looks nice. With all the choices available, there is no need to sacrifice durability and long-lasting light fixtures just to make your home look nice. You can have them both in one light fixture.
 Now for a few practical tips when picking out the lights. You can purchase motion detector lights so that the stronger lights meant to protect against home burglaries only come on when someone or something approaches the home. It is also suggested that you go with low-voltage lighting. Experts say that super bright lights actually take away from the overall safety, since they create even darker spots to those areas not illuminated. It creates a blinding effect that actually gives burglars the shadows and darkness they desire.
