MOON GARDENS & LANDSCAPE LIGHTING

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Moon Gardens and other Landscape Lighting Ideas

As the segue from your home to the outside world, your landscape serves many purposes. Landscapes provide shelter and privacy, let you know you’re home, give you a place for outdoor entertaining, and beautify your surroundings.

Not surprisingly, landscape lighting, as an extension of your home’s landscaping, also serves these same purposes. Today, we’ll discuss how you can light your yard after leaving the neon lights of the city, the purposes of landscape lighting, and how to use it for different effects.

Purposes

As previously discussed in previous blogs, landscape lighting fills multiple functions. In the most practical sense, it makes it easier to see where you’re going and extends the amount of time you can entertain in your yard.

Similarly, seeing where you’re going also improves the safety of your environment and protects you from liability. But it also serves another safety function – making your home more secure. Lighting makes you less likely to be a target of property crime.

Finally, the main focus of today’s blog will be aesthetics. You can use landscape lighting to accentuate certain yard features or change their feel. Below, you’ll find some of the ways you can do that.

Landscape Lighting Types and Position

Where you place your lights has a significant effect on how they look. Different placements are typically used for different purposes. Here are some common ways to feature lighting:

Path Lighting

Path lighting, as the name implies, is installed lighting where you will be stepping (or outside of the landscape context, using a vehicle). These lights tend to be in the ground, pointed toward where people will be walking.

Back Lighting

Back Lighting is often used for trees and other landscape features. Again, as the name gives away, this is done from behind the subject of the lighting. They show off the silhouettes of your plants.

Uplighting

Uplighting uses low-lying lights pointed upward toward trees, shrubs, or your landscape as a whole. It can help to feature specific features of your yard.

Well Lighting

Well Lighting conceals the light sources and is often used in areas such as rock gardens.

Flood Lighting

Flood Lighting is generally not considered the most aesthetically pleasing lighting method. It uses very bright lights and, in a landscaping context, is usually used more for security than aesthetic purposes. However, outside of landscaping, you will find flood lights used in any situation where workers must operate during the nighttime hours.

Color Temperature

One of the ways that we use lighting to create mood is by utilizing color temperatures – a reference to how warm or cool a light appears. For example, the more blue light is, the cooler the color temperature. Warmer color temperatures are more yellow and red.

Put another way, moonlight is cool while sunlight is warm. You can use this knowledge to create the effect you want in your yard and gardens in the evening. You may even want to change the color temperature at different seasons of the year.

Moon Gardens

One of the most fun ways to use landscape lighting is to design lightscapes that reframe how you see a garden in the daytime. And one of the popular ways to do this is with a moon garden.

Typically, moon gardens use white or light-colored flowers that are not as easy to see during the day. Once night falls, you can use a cool color temperature light to illuminate the flowers, making them appear to glow. When lit from overhead, this can have the effect of looking like the moon itself is lighting the flowers, while lit from below can give a magical effect.

Water

Light and water can have a lovely interplay. If you have a pool, fountain, or other water features on your property, you have an excellent opportunity to use the two to accentuate each other. Warm lighting will contrast the water, while cool lighting will accent it.

Lighting is a complex process with many factors influencing how it will turn out. So naturally, we don’t have time to teach you everything you could know about landscape lighting in fewer than one thousand words! But knowing a little about the concepts behind lighting choice will go a long way in helping you decide how you want your yard to appear.

Of course, like all your landscaping, you don’t have to figure it out alone! CGL will take your ideas and combine them with our expertise to create a yard that is truly lit!