Making Sure Your Garden Flourishes

Landscape lighting plays a significant role in the curb appeal of any yard. After dark, your lighting choices will be very important. Creative use of light can highlight sections of your lawn while leaving other areas artistically in shadow. While adding and removing bushes, trees, and other large landscaping features can be a significant project, changing lighting is often a much easier task. This ease gives you more freedom to play with ideas, design unique creations, and change your mind later if you decide that a particular approach isn't working. There's no limit to the options available, but here are four ideas to get you started.

Integrate Lighting With Landscape Features

Many traditional forms of landscape lighting focus on highlighting features on your landscape, but you can directly integrate lights with existing features. The quintessential version of this is the magical log, but many other options exist as well and opportunities abound for do-it-yourself creations. Adding lighting below walkways or hidden along tree trunks are great options to make portions of your lawn glow. LED light strips are flexible enough to fit almost anywhere, so the possibilities for this style of lighting are nearly limitless.

Keep It Subtle

Not every light in your yard has to scream "here I am!" to visitors. Subtle, conservative light placement can add highlights without overwhelming other features on your lawn. The best part? You don't need any particular types of lighting to pull this off. Instead, replace your existing bulbs with lower output versions. This approach works exceptionally with arrays of lights, such as hanging globe lights from trees or running multiple lights along a path. Subtle lighting can also be an excellent way to emphasize other areas of the yard that you are spotlighting with brighter lights.

Go Deep

Do you have water features on your landscape? There's no better place for some strategically placed lighting than down below. Water-proof landscapes lights are affordable and can make those water features stand out. Underwater lighting can be an especially attractive option if other nearby features are kept dark or only lit by soft, subtle lighting. Ponds and fountains are an especially great place to use colored lighting as well, allowing you to be creative unique and striking effects that will make your water features pop.

String Creatively

String lights are becoming more and more common, but that doesn't mean that there aren't still creative and unique uses for them. String lights can easily be hung from trees, across bushes, or over hard landscaping features. Even better, you can hang these lights in creative patterns to construct shapes and other unique details to impress your guests. Just because string lights are ubiquitous doesn't mean that they don't deserve a place in your yard.