Night-lighting your landscape offers a creative way to showcase your home and landscape after dark. Strategically placed lights can dramatize trees, enhance focal points, and accentuate shrubs, landscape statuary, fountains and planting beds. By installing landscape lighting for your home, you enable the opportunity to enjoy your landscape throughout the season no mater the hour of day.

Lighting your Minneapolis landscape can be done for safety, as well adding dramatic interest to your landscape. When designing a landscape lighting scheme, not only do you want to showcase your landscape in the best light, but also help your guests from tripping on steps or walkways.

Typically, the a lighting design begins with a focus on paved surfaces such as paver walkways, natural stone steps, and along retaining walls to help people see where they are traversing the landscape. Generally, pathway lights are placed along walkways. Pathway lights are lights that deflect light down and will illuminate the way. The pathway lights will also provide a warm glow to plants and flowers bordering the path or walkway. The same pathway lights can be used to enhance your stone patio or outdoor living space.

After addressing in design the safety issues, attention to detail is brought to create dramatic and subtle effects upon your landscape. Many landscapes have structural elements, trees, or shrubs that can be showcased for aesthetic reasons. Shedding light on a scene can be done in two ways.  Through the use of down-lighting and up-lighting. When implemnting either method, the way you manipulate the light, will result in the desired affect you are looking to achieve on the landscape.

Down-lighting is a less common technique.  With down-lighting, the light source comes from above, as from the moon, its effect becomes to look natural. One dramatic way of down-lighting is to mount lighting near the top of a large tree or group of trees. By placing the light at the top of the canopy, light streams down mimicing moonlight, which produces interesting shadows on the ground.

Up-lighting creates a dramatic reversal of down-lighting, creating striking effects. Typically a light source is placed in front of the structure or element, and light is directed upward to highlight a tree’s canopy, showcase a retaining wall, or dramatically feature a structure in the landscape. Also use up-lighting to show off fountains or accent the homes architecture. A caution to note, be aware of over-lighting the landscape, this can give an artificial look to the landscape. Too much light in the landscape at night, fails to focus attention on aspects of the landscape that clients want to emphasize and light.

For information on landscape designs using the outdoor lighting techniques for your landscaping in Minneapolis, contact Ground One Enterprises of MN at 952-884-3336.