Landscape Lighting for Trees

One way to make your home feel more welcoming at night is with landscape lighting. While your house is on full display during the day, its interesting architectural details and meticulously maintained yard go unseen at nighttime. You can light up your trees using several different techniques to highlight key elements and give your yard a warm glow.

When choosing the right lighting elements for your yard, consider the sizes and shapes of your trees. For instance, if you want to highlight a tall, slender tree, such as a palm tree, use narrow-focused spot beams shining up from the ground. On the other hand, flood lights will illuminate short, wide trees and bushes well. If you want to showcase a particularly eye-catching tree, you can aim two lights at it, which will make it the focal point of the yard.

There are a few reasons for choosing low-voltage landscaping lighting. Not only is it more affordable than high-voltage lighting, but it's safer to install and handle as well. Low-voltage lighting operates at one-tenth of the power of high-voltage lighting, but the result is a natural, warm glow reminiscent of moonlight. The soft lighting elements will still provide enough lighting to showcase your home and foliage, and your monthly electric bill will be lower, especially if you use energy-efficient light-emitting diode lights. You can use a transformer to reduce your 120-V current to 12 V for outdoor use.

There are three main landscape illumination techniques -- uplighting, silhouetting and moonlighting. With uplighting, the lights are placed on the ground and shine up toward the tree. This technique works best for deciduous and flowering trees as it shows off their structures well. Lights are aimed at a wall or structure behind a single tree or a group of trees in the silhouetting technique. Not only are the trees slightly illuminated, their dark shadows appear on the illuminated background, creating a dramatic look. To achieve a natural-looking moonlighting effect, install lights high on the trunk of a large tree -- using a ladder and a helper -- so that the glow is cast down through the branches to create shadows on the ground.

To maintain an elegant, classy appearance, choose lights in the neutral color range, which is typically between 2,700 to 3,000 kelvins; you can find this information on the bulb box. Try to find a color that is reminiscent of moonlight for a natural look. If you use brightly colored lighting, the hues, such as blue or red, may not complement the color of your home when reflected off of it.