How to Illuminate Your Landscape: 12 Outdoor Lighting Trends & Tips

If your garden’s beauty fades with the sun, lighting helps extend your enjoyment long after the sun sets. Here are 12 outdoor lighting ideas to illuminate your landscape with plenty of evening drama.

1. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Uplighting vs. Downlighting

The strategic positioning of landscape lighting is essential. The angle impacts the shadow effect and contrast between dark and light. Downlighting is softer, creating gentle, even illumination that feels like moonlight, while uplighting creates high contrast with pronounced shadows.

For example, positioning landscape lighting in the trees casts a soft light down to the ground, capturing its colour and accenting its shape. With fewer shadows, the beauty of the tree becomes the focus. Uplighting, on the other hand, has a far more dramatic effect, with shadowing and contrasts which can sometimes feel a little eerie.

2. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Create Focal Points

Focusing landscaping lighting on your best architectural and garden features creates focal points. The right light showcases the features lost at night, whether it is the cascading tendrils of a willow tree or the intricate texture of a stone retaining wall.

Other points of interest include a water feature, urns, sculptures, or structures such as pergolas, gazebos, and arbours. Integrated lighting is the latest trend, highlighting focal points such as underlighting on bars, built-in lights on furniture, and glowing urns.

3. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Add Drama

As mentioned, uplighting is one of the easiest ways to add drama to vertical features, especially trees, taller shrubs, and ornamental grass. Landscape lighting allows you to add depth in the darkest areas of the space while creating striking silhouettes using natural forms.

A wider beam reduces contrast and creates dramatic highlights, while narrow beams are ideal for uplit spotlights to create more texture on something like retaining walls.

4. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Use Layered Illumination

Layered landscape lighting elevates your garden’s features, helping to direct the eye to varying aspects of the space. For example, spotlights on your trees and tall grasses should be balanced with smaller accent lights that draw attention to low-lying garden beds.

Without layered lighting, you create too much contrast between the brightly lit features and pockets of darkness.

5. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Make a Statement

Landscape lighting can transform an unassuming tree during the day into a statement tree at night. When night falls and light is cast, suddenly that ho-hum tree comes alive with shadow and dimension.

With the proper lighting, standard garden features, from sheds to urns and retaining walls to humble bushes, can all become statement pieces in an enchanted night garden.

6. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Tone it Down

A “glaring” landscape lighting mistake to avoid is using overly bright lights or an overabundance of light features. Bold lighting is harsh on the eyes and washes out the landscaping features you are trying to showcase.

Subtle lighting is far more effective. For example, harsh, bright front-facing lights make your landscape feel two-dimensional, while side lighting offers gentle illumination that brings out the area’s beauty. Harsh lighting is also a nuisance to neighbours, so it’s just good manners to tone it down.

7. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Understand Solar Lighting

Solar lights are an affordable way to light certain aspects of your garden, such as pathways. However, relying on them too heavily can lead to disappointing results. First, they require full sun to optimize their performance.

Second, they don’t produce enough light to be effective, a danger in areas with uneven surfaces, steps, or unexpected obstacles. A mix of solar lights in full-sun areas with traditional hard-wired lighting will provide the ideal balance for safety and visual impact.

8. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Focus on Safety

Once night falls, a poorly lit backyard can become dangerous. Focusing on areas such as pathways, stairs, and uneven surfaces will make it safer to navigate your outdoor space. New trends in walkway lighting include lights recessed directly in the path.

However, this can sometimes make it difficult for some people to discern uneven areas, especially for highly textured materials like flagstone. Traditional side path lighting is always the safest. It also draws attention to pretty garden beds along the path.

Recessed lighting works well in areas, such as steps, or to draw attention to unexpected slopes or curves in the path.

9. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Improve Task Lighting

Task lighting is often overlooked in landscape lighting designs. However, it is essential when creating a functional outdoor living space. The type of light required depends on what you’re doing. For example, brighter LED outdoor fixtures are needed in the cooking area for efficient cooking.

In the dining area, softer, ambient light is enough to illuminate the table while eating. If you have a pool, lighting should be brighter to keep people safe, while in the area where you sit and chat over drinks, soft light or even candlelight will do nicely.

Careful consideration of how the light is positioned and the amount of shadows will ensure that you have a light source suitable for specific tasks.

10. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Understand Angles

Using a flashlight test is a pro tip that helps ensure your landscaping lighting illuminates the areas where you want it to. You can use a flashlight to see how different angles of the light beam impact each area.

Testing angles determines which placement gets the desired effect and avoids garden lighting faux pas.

11. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Colour and Brightness

Although not for everyone, colourful mood lighting adds fun and ambiance to your outdoor space. It can even be adjusted to create a festive feel during the holidays. Dimness controls allow you to increase and decrease light depending on whether you need more light to complete a task or lower light for quiet conversation. Both features will enable you to adjust the lighting to the mood.

12. Outdoor Lighting Ideas: Get Smart

Smart technology offers immediate control over outdoor lighting. Whether setting lights on a timer, using controls to increase or decrease brightness, or changing the colour to create different moods, smart lighting allows you to customize your landscape lighting from the convenience of your phone.

Before starting your next landscaping project, contact the Luxe Landscape & Construction experts. You can call us at 289-800-7124 or contact us online. We’ll lead you down the right design path and ensure exceptional workmanship to create an idyllic outdoor retreat.