Being able to correctly use outdoor accent lighting will make or break the overall garden light plans that you have for your yard.  When used correctly, accent lighting will illuminate focal points in your yard with a soft low level light that will draw people’s eyes.  But done incorrectly, accent lighting can turn into a blight on your yard, washing out otherwise beautiful and interesting features and casting ugly shadows all over your garden.

Accent lighting in general is using a light fixture to emphasize some kind of focal point, whether it be a plant, fountain, facade, or some other interesting object.  You can do this in a multitude of ways, using uplight, downlighting, or even crosslighting to highlight your focal point.  You can also achieve great accent lighting from any point of origin.  You can place lights anywhere from underwater to up in the trees, or on the ground, or even hidden in some kind of structure.  The only requirement is that your focal point should be lit up against a backdrop that is ideally dark, or at least much less illuminated.  This can be a hedge, another plant, or a wall of some kind.

When you’re installing your lights, make sure that you don’t place the lights too far away or use an incredibly high wattage bulb.  Take time to make sure that you have the right positioning and aiming for your light fixture.  This will vary from object to object and from location to location.  If you do choose the wrong bulb wattage, positioning, or placement for your lights, two things can potentially happen that could ruin your lighting plan.  First, you could overlight your focal point, creating a washed out appearance.  When this happens the light runs into the background, which is supposed to be dark, and prevents the viewer from distinguishing colors from one another or even the foreground from the background.  The second major problem you may run into if your lights are wrongly configured is that you end up creating ugly shadows that splash across onto other surfaces that you want lit and accented as well.

Outdoor accent lighting is easy to define and imagine, but hard to get exactly right.  Before you set your light fixtures in stone, especially if you are literally setting them in stone, do some experimentation with different placements and bulbs.  See which one setup gives you the accent lighting you want without washing out your target.  When you first start your garden lighting plans this may seem a little bit tedious, but as time goes on you should get better and better with your placement and have to spend less and less time on trial and error.

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Filed under: Designing and Installing Landscape Lighting • Garden Lighting Tips

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