Outdoor Garden Lighting Techniques for Flowers, Trees, and Walls

The three basic things that almost everyone has in their garden are flowers, trees, and walls.  When you’re designing outdoor garden lighting plans, each of these things is going to need a different type of light and lighting style.  Buy using a lighting style that matches the plants or architectural structures in your garden, you can create stunning visual effects when the sun goes down.

Lighting Flowers

Outdoor garden lighting can bring out the best in both natural and artificial silk flowers under the night sky. Flowers and other plants that are fairly low to the ground work best under down lighting.  Down lighting works best because the flowers point upwards and people will be looking down at them.  To use this, install lights in your flower beds that are higher than the flowers and cast their light down onto them.  The light will reflect off the tops of the flowers, bringing out incredible colors at night.  For unique effects, try using black lights or ultraviolet lights.  Some plants have different colors that are only visible under this form of light.

Lighting Trees

Trees are another common element in most gardens, but the method for lighting them is much different than the method used for flowers.  IF you want to light your tree, the best method to use is up lighting.  Up lights are easy to install, you essentially stake them into the ground at the base of the tree, and point the lights up. Make sure that whatever you do, the lighting fixture is angled away from your guest’s eyes.  Because these lights are strong, if someone inadvertently walks into the middle of the beam and looks at it, the risk doing damage to their eyes.  Also consider using a frosted lens on your up lights.  This will keep overall bulb glare down, a problem many bright lights have.

One interested effect you can create with up lights is to make a silhouette of the tree.  Do this by mounting the light fixture behind the tree.  The light comes out shining around the tree, but leaves the tree itself black, creating a very interesting, sometimes spooky looking, silhouette.

Lighting Walls

Walls are an often overlooked area to place outdoor garden lights.  A interesting wall to light can include the side of your house, a shed, or even a fence.  The walls don’t even have to have anything particularly interesting on them to benefit from lighting them up!  Instead, use plants around the walls to cast shadows on them.  Do this by placing lights the point up through grass, flowers, or even small trees.  The light will shine around the plants making shadows that will appear on your wall.

There are many different, interesting ways to use garden light throughout your landscape.  These ideas just scratch the surface.  Use your imagination and these simple tips to make your landscape come alive at night!