- Jul. 26, 2021
Light Up The Night: Landscape Lighting Ideas for a Beautiful Yard
Adding lighting to your landscape is one of the fastest and highest-impact ways to raise the aesthetic appeal of your yard. Landscape lighting extends the amount of time you can enjoy your yard in a day, particularly when daylight hours run short. It sets a dreamy and romantic ambience. It also contributes to general neighbourhood safety. Finally, it makes your home feel more welcoming overall.
Well-placed landscape lighting guides you through the yard, highlights the best features of your landscape, and gives you a new perspective on your property. Not only do yard lights make it more enjoyable to stay outside after dark, but they also offer beautiful views of your yard from indoors.
Here are 5 of the most impactful landscape lighting options to add to your Powell River yard.
Stair Lighting for Beauty & Safety
Adding stair lighting creates ambiance and lowers the risk of evening trips or falls. Stair lighting is relatively subtle, but it helps draw the eye up towards your home, and it makes navigating back to the house much easier after dark.
There are many different ways to add stair lighting. You could use rope lights along the back of the tread or under the edge of the tread above, run it along the underside of your handrail, or even weave it back and forth through spindles. There are many options for individual lights, too; one per step or every other step is often enough. Search for “outdoor stair lighting” on Pinterest for inspiration.
Pathway Lighting to Guide the Way
Like stair lights, pathway lighting creates a beautiful aesthetic while also improving safety. Like the stairs, you can use rope lighting along the edge of pathways to subtly define the boundaries of the path. There is a nearly endless selection of different styles of solar lights for marking the edge of a path, from sleek minimalist to ornate designs that cast intricate and beautiful shadows.
Spotlights on Feature Trees & Shrubs
Highlighting your favourite specimen trees and shrubs with spotlights allows you to enjoy a completely different perspective of their beauty while also showing them off to passersby and neighbours. Your trees and shrubs may have an entirely different personality at night!
You can also use spotlights to illuminate the architectural features of your home or landscape. Fountains and water features lit up at night instantly become romantic and intriguing focal points. An alternating pattern of shadows up a walkway adds a new dimension to your home’s style. Sconce spotlights on the walls of your home softly reveal architectural details and make your home look welcoming.
String Lights on Everything
String lights are such a favourite for the landscape, and there are plenty of reasons why. There are so many different styles of string lights available, and they can be used in endless beautiful ways to create a cozy atmosphere in your yard and on your patio.
Do you have perfect hammock trees in your yard? Spiral outdoor fairy lights around the trunks as high as you can reach to create a cozy nighttime nook under the tree canopy.
If you have a pergola or gazebo, running several strands of string lights with beautiful Edison-style bulbs across the top or between side posts gives the feeling of being on a cafe or pub patio. Weave string lights between the spindles of your deck railing or around the posts to create a cozy atmosphere that gently highlights the beauty of your patio planters after dark.
If you’re going to use string lights that plug into an outlet, just make sure the ones you’re using are indicated as safe for outdoor use. The bonus of plug-in lights is that you can set them on a timer, so they come on and turn off at exactly the right moment.
There are also lots of string lights that have solar sensors available now. As long as you can set the sensor, often it’s on a stake you can stick into the ground, somewhere that it gets lots of daylight, your lights will automatically come on at dusk and go out whenever the charge from the day is used up. Solar lights are great because they’re free to run, but the sensors and batteries may start to wear out and work less consistently over time.
Swing by Mother Nature soon to check out our collection of landscape lighting options and find some that suit your style.