If you love admiring the trees in your yard throughout the day, you don’t have to stop enjoying them after the sun sets. Instead, ask outdoor lighting professionals for help with how to illuminate a tree. Enhancing your landscape after dark can involve spotlights, tree uplighting, and other lighting options.
Use Lights at Ground Level for Tree Uplighting
One of the most common outdoor lighting tips is illuminating the tree from the ground, called uplighting. This technique gives the tree a distinctive glow, highlighting its leaves and any flowers.
You can use recessed well lights to create the uplighting effect to make the fixtures less visible during the day. Often, landscaping professionals will install these lights along a walkway to enhance safety by illuminating the path as well.
Landscaping professionals will measure the tree’s height before recommending uplighting options. The lighting angles and intensity levels the professionals will use depend on the height of the tree.
Use the Tree’s Height To Attach Lights for Downlighting
If you have items on the ground that you’d like to illuminate at night, you might consider using the tree to generate downlighting. This wouldn’t necessarily illuminate a tree entirely, but you could use it to highlight lower sections of the tree.
If you have a bench, fire pit, or patio area underneath a tree, downlighting is the ideal way to illuminate it. Mount the light to one of the branches of the tree. If you want direct downlighting, make sure there are no branches or leaves in the way. If you want less subtle downlighting, hang the light higher in the tree where random branches and leaves will create some shadows.
Add Hanging Lights Inside the Tree
Some people prefer to hang lights in the tree, giving the landscaping a charm that ground-based lights can’t match. Use strings of lights or individual lanterns inside the tree’s branches to spread the light throughout the tree. If you have a tree near a patio or deck, hanging lights create a beautiful ambiance during gatherings.
Spotlights Can Illuminate Part of the Tree
If you’d like to highlight parts of the tree’s canopy, you can use spotlights. Highlighting a flowering tree or a species with an interesting branch structure works well with this technique.
You could hang a spotlight on a post or on the side of your house or garage. Adjust the height of the mounted spotlight to focus the angle of the light on the exact section of the tree you want to illuminate.
Make Your Trees Stand Out After Dark With the Help of Austin Outdoor Lighting Design
At Austin Outdoor Lighting Design, our professionals have many accent lighting ideas for illuminating a tree. We will study your trees and overall landscape design, looking for the perfect way to arrange light placement, beam spread, and intensity to achieve the desired result.
Designing outdoor lighting doesn’t have to be a stressful process when you rely on our professionals. For a free price quote, call us today at (512) 601-4844.