Landscape Lighting a Small Garden
Posted by Landscaper | Filed under Installation Guides, Landscape Lighting Effects, Landscape Lighting Trees, landscape lighting kits
Silly of me, I know, but I suppose some of you are wondering what the results of my weekend landscape lighting kit installation looked like. All that work on the step-by-step installation guide and I forgot to include pictures of the finished product. Let’s rectify that right away with the pictures that resulted from my efforts to landscape light my friend’s small garden.
This first shot shows the little pond and waterfall surrounded by planting beds. The light on the left was left with a full length stem. Eryn wanted the light on the right to be shorter (I didn’t ask why) so I only used half the stem when I put it in. They have plans to install a light in the pond so that the water and waterfall are illuminated from below but that’s a whole other installation effort entirely. This kit is NOT designed for underwater lighting. For now, the objective was just to light up the ferns and other plants around the pond a little so they can enjoy them at night.
This next image shows the way we used uplighting to cast dramatic shadows on the privacy fence on one side of their yard. I would have preferred the light to be set back a little further and angled down a hair so the full shadow of the palm hit the wall. Unfortunately the planting area is narrow so I could only move the light back so far. The result is that the top of the shadow gets cut off at the top of the fence. Still, it’s a dramatic look and you can see why they want another spot light so they can create an entire panorama of palm shadows on their fence with the 2 other palms in their garden. As for that tiki torch, I think it needs a home outside the lighting scheme, but they love seeing it all lit up.
The image above shows how the 2nd spotlight in the kit was angled to illuminate the trunk of the tree. Though not visible in the picture, the wash of light spreads nicely into the canopy as well. In a perfect world I’d want one more spot light placed behind the camera to splash even more light into the leaves above. Who knows… they have enough wattage to accommodate one so maybe they’ll make my dream a reality someday.
What you should remember with any uplighting effort is to place the landscape light so that it isn’t shining back towards the viewer in anyway. That’s almost impossible to accomplish in some cases so you have to make compromises. In this case, for example, the area most often occupied is behind the light in the brick patio area. Anybody walking in through the gate at night, however, would be a bit blinded. Rick and Eryn swear that nobody comes through that gate at night so, in this case, there isn’t much concern with it blinding anybody.
Finally, here’s a shot capturing most of their humble little garden. There are a pair of tier lights behind the lounge chairs you see in this picture. A pair of interesting potted plants live there and I’d like to see one of them spotlit to cast a tremendous shadow against the brick of the house, but the English ivy covering much of the brick would ruin the result.
As I already mentioned, Rick and Eryn love the result. It really is pretty nice for a couple hours of unexpected labor. The point for you, dear reader, is that just about anybody can install landscape lighting and get results like this. Better, even, if you have a yard that lends itself particularly well to being lit. So don’t let a false fear of complexity scare you off of the idea. This is something well within your grasp and the results you get, if you follow what you’ve learnt here and in my other posts, can be simply stunning.
Tags: landscape lighting a small garden, landscape lighting kit, tier lights, uplighting
