With winter upon us, trees have lost their leaves, and your garden might be looking a bit bare. But, after dark, this provides the perfect opportunity to transform your property into a winter wonderland. With a professional outdoor landscape lighting installation you can add a sense of drama and beauty to your home’s exterior.
Southern Landscape Lighting Systems shares their top five landscape lighting techniques for the winter season:
Add Contrast with Uplighting Your Garden’s Landscape Design
Uplighting, rather than using floodlights, offers great contrast where up lights are placed closer to the building resulting in a bolder, more dramatic effect. Different from the typical wall-washing light from floodlights, it’s much easier to draw attention to the focal points of a landscape. This might range from architectural features of the home itself to areas of interest in the garden such as trees, fountains, structures or statues. For uplighting, spotlights and well lights are the most popular fixtures.
Create an Illuminated Backdrop with Silhouetting Landscape Lighting Effect
Silhouetting is where a fixture is placed behind the featured design and aimed against a wall to create a backlit feature. This is an excellent option for winter when trees lose their leaves, offering the opportunity to create interesting outlines using the bare trees. This technique is known for its ability to create intrigue through the interesting outlines and profiles of features that it creates. For silhouetting, spotlights and well lights work best to create the shadowed shapes that contrast with the light behind.
Choose a Softer Juxtaposition of Light and Dark with the Shadowing Lighting Technique
This technique is similar to silhouetting, where the lighting fixture is placed at the base of the fixture and aimed at an adjacent wall. But the style of the lighting is much gentler with the goal being to create a softer shadow. The technique works well all year round and is often used to highlight a tree with delicate, open foliage. It’s effective in winter where the shadows created by trees that don’t have leaves tend to be harsh and scary-looking rather than welcoming.
Whether in winter or summer, shadowing works to create drama and depth to a home’s facade, although the overall effect is more subtle. Shadowing can be added to your garden by a landscape lighting company using a combination of floodlights, well lights, and spotlights.
Recreate the Feeling of a Moonlit Night with Moonlighting
The moonlighting technique is created by placing a downlight fixture as high up inside a tree as possible. It should have a full glare guard and be angled down. By doing this the light mimics the look of moonlight shining down through the branches. The light causes shadow patterns to appear on the ground that looks both beautiful and very natural. It is a good option in winter as the lighting is more subtle, with less glare, which is necessary when the trees are bare, and many of the vibrant features of a garden in summer are not present. Moonlighting is done with downlights and works best with trees that have open branches.
Add Light to Your Garden with Downlighting
The downlighting technique works in a similar way to moonlighting, but the effect that it creates is far brighter. To create the downlighting effect, fixtures are placed high up in features such as trees, eaves, trellises, or walls to pointed downwards, casting a pool of light over a large area. The amount of light that you want each fixture to provide can be adjusted by placing the light higher (for more illumination) or lower (to light a path or a smaller area of the yard).
Southern Landscape Lighting Systems provides outdoor lighting solutions to residents throughout Atlanta. Their friendly, professional services set them apart, ensuring that their clients have a seamless, excellent experience every time.