Beautiful plants bring the lion’s share of visual appeal to a landscape during the day, but their abilities become fairly limited at night. In order to let them enjoy the same attention regardless of the sun’s position, you can rely on a variety of landscape lighting techniques to get the job done. A direct landscape lighting approach to your plantings will work wonders. During your landscape renovation this summer, don’t forget your plantings: how outdoor lighting can also enhance landscape beds in Trenton, MI.
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Lighting for Safety
Regardless of what you’re trying to accomplish in landscape design, the primary function of landscape lights is to keep a high level of safety around the outside of your home. Landscape lighting such as low-lying walkway lights can be integrated into plant beds, where they will highlight walking surfaces as well as the edges of plant beds so delicate plants don’t get trampled in the dark.
Subtle Lighting for Delicate Viewing
Many flowers and leafy greens are delicate to the touch. These details are best viewed from up close, which can make landscape lighting quite complicated. For instance, spotlights (which are great for highlighting trees) will likely be too intense to highlight shrubs, perennials, and annuals in the best light. Illuminating more delicate plants at night could be accomplished with a different lighting technique such as washing, where light is bounced off a flat vertical surface such as the side of the home or a retaining wall. Or, small and less-intense lights aimed from several directions will provide softer lighting without the glare of high-intensity lights.
Shield Lights
Shield lights are fixtures that direct the light in one direction and away from potential eye contact. These lights are quite useful for focusing on single plants, but they can also be used in an array of lights that work to bring light to a larger planting feature, such as a shrub. These smaller lights will make wonderful use of lighting energy to bring attention to your plantings. At the same time, they can safely light the way along a walkway.
Mushroom Lamps
Mushroom lamps are excellent for use in illuminating walkways for safety, but they’re also great at bringing overhead light to plantings. The mushroom-inspired shape of the lamps enables all of the light energy to be focused downwards at a low angle. This replaces the use of overhead floodlights which will do an inefficient and rather poor job of creating depth perception and bringing out the beauty of your plantings. You can use mushroom lamps in many areas of your landscape and on the edges of your paved surfaces.
Enhancing Ambience with indirect Lighting
Direct light is, of course, one of the best ways to bring attention to plantings, but the importance of ambient light cannot be overstated. By using indirect lighting techniques such as moonlighting or backsplashing, you will enhance nighttime beauty of your plantings and increase depth perception in your landscape.
Building Infrastructure
Landscape lighting is a little more complicated when it comes to plant life. The simple reason is that plants grow both upwards and outwards. This means that a light which was once perfectly angled towards a smaller plant may be enveloped by it as it grows, which will mean repositioning the light over time. Instead of installing all permanent lighting around your plantings, you could opt for a combination of permanent (hard-wired) lighting as well as movable lights that are connected to outdoor electrical outlets. That way, you can adapt to the lighting demands as your plants grow.
Related: EXTEND THE USE OF YOUR OUTDOOR SPACE WITH OUTDOOR LIGHTING IN NEW BOSTON AND GROSSE ILE, MI
