5 Tips for Lighting Your Biggest Landscape Features
We love trees! From evergreens to deciduous, from towering groves to delicate ornamentals, trees make your landscape unique. Landscape lighting for trees creates a beautiful portrait of your property at night.
Here are five of our top tips for illuminating your trees:
- Uplighting for contrast and drama
- Moonlighting for natural effect
- Enhance evergreens with the right light color
- Illuminate groupings of tall trees
- Spotlight ornamental trees
Below, check out some photos from our Cincinnati-area projects.
1. Landscape Lighting for Trees:
Uplighting for Contrast and Drama
This home’s walkway is dramatically lit up from both sides. We installed uplight fixtures for the brick and the mature trees lining the path, along with intermittent path lights. Uplighting is the lighting technique to choose for impactful contrast that shows off details of architecture and landscaping alike.
2. Landscape Lighting for Trees:
Moonlighting for Natural Effect
Moonlighting involves installing fixtures high up and shining them towards the ground, to mimic the light of the moon. When moonlighting trees, shifting shadows filter down and light up pathways or features with more natural effect. With this Cincinnati client, we combined both uplighting and moonlighting to highlight tree trunk textures, along with softening the pathway illumination with the organic shadows of leaves and branches. The focal point is a river-rock pond with gurgling waterfall, which we also lit with landscape lighting.
Moonlighting is also gentle and relaxing landscape lighting technique for wooded seating areas. This LUX Landscape Lighting client can enjoy the experience of sitting in the moonlight anytime they want. The effect also looks beautiful from the windows of the home.
3. Landscape Lighting for Trees:
Enhance Evergreens with the Right Light Color
The wonderful thing about evergreen trees is that they are always green! Arborvitae trees are an especially popular landscaping choice for privacy screens. When we design landscape lighting for trees, we use a green-tinted fixture for evergreens. This shows off the rich tones of these trees after dark, and it’s quite stunning. You can see the difference in this photo that includes both a deciduous tree in the foreground and evergreens in the background.
4. Landscape Lighting for Trees:
Illuminate Groupings of Tall Trees
Lighting one tree is nice, but when you have a beautiful grove of diverse trees, landscape lighting for trees makes a stunning feature at night. This landscape lighting client loves their forested walkway and now can enjoy a stroll among the trees after the sun sets.
5. Landscape Lighting for Trees:
Spotlight Ornamental Trees
Many homeowners have invested in the planting, pruning and care of ornamental trees. Why not show off these gorgeous trees at night? They require a different lighting approach from their larger brethren, similar to lighting statuary.
Do you have some trees that would look beautiful lit up? Contact us for a free consultation.