Too often, outside lighting means a porch light by the door and a lamppost marking the end of the driveway. Today however, vibrant, luminescent options mean your home and garden can be as dazzling by moonlight as they are by light of day. And the new LED designs make it affordable and environmentally sound.
Learn about outside lighting and create safety, romance and brilliance in your landscape
Well-placed light fixtures can illuminate dark driveways or sidewalks, allowing family and friends to approach your home safely. Shining a small beacon on your house number is a great help for emergency services, visitors and late night pizza delivery. Branches of foundation shrubs cast artistic shadows across house walls with just a small spotlight aimed through them. Stately oaks become dramatic statements as sunken well lights reflect like fire across the slick surfaces of their leaves.
The selection of outdoor lighting is endless…
- Beacons and spotlights show off attractive features of front doors, specimen trees, or garden statuary.
- Recessed well lights create warm opulence when shined upward through tall grasses. Placed at the base of specimen trees or groupings they create tall, dancing shadows.
- Lighting a pathway can be as simple as a row of stemmed lights aimed upon a sidewalk or garden steppers.
- Specialty lights include hanging lanterns, animal theme lights, and radiant globes that light paths, edges of garden beds, or prized perennials.
- Decorative strings of lights, once used only at holidays, are now very popular year-round to create a romantic or fantasy effect, to outline pergolas and trellises or to emphasize a shapely tree.
Easy to install and inexpensive to use
Outdoor lighting is available in two affordable options: LED and Solar. Low Emissions Diodes use a fraction of the energy of traditional lighting and emit much less heat. Solar options are perfect in the landscape. Improved solar panels will provide enough power to keep lights shining bright until dawn. Twelve volt LEDs and Solar Lights require no permits to install and their cables need only be hidden under soil or mulch rather than buried.
Boulder Landscape and Design can design and install outside lighting for your property. Daylight hours will be noticeably shorter soon!