Why You Should Consider Landscape Lighting for Shrubs
Shrubs are present in almost every landscape. However, even when people are looking into lighting, they too often overlook landscape lighting for shrubs. This is a shame, since landscape lighting for shrubs can create a beautiful effect that will make your home look its best in the evening.
Shrub lighting is a great compliment. When perimeter shrubbery is lit up it can improve the security of your home. Here's what you need to know about landscape lighting for shrubs and how to choose the best lighting options for your landscape.
How Do I Light Up a Shrub?
There are many ways to light up shrubs. In fact, a quality landscape lighting services company may be able to offer more ways to light up shrubs than any other element of your yard. Shrubs can serve as a middle ground between flower beds and trees. They can also act as specimen plants. Dense shrubs have a lot in common with fencing when it comes to how they can be lit.
What is Landscape Lighting for Shrubs?
Unfortunately, shrubs are sometimes overlooked when it comes to landscape lighting. It's easy to light up a huge signature tree or shine a light directly onto a building. Lighting shrubs can be a bit less obvious. However, there are a lot of different ways that you can light up a shrub to create a wonderful effect.
Landscape lighting for shrubs can take many forms. It can serve as perimeter lighting, be used to highlight plants, serve as a compliment for lighting trees in flower beds, and much more.
Shrubs can be lit from underneath, over top, in front, from behind, and much more. Lighting can emphasize the shape or color of the shrub. It can also provide gentle overall lighting to a scene that includes shrubs. Here are a few of the ways that landscape lighting for shrubs can work in your garden:
Hide the Lights
You love the effect of landscape lighting. That doesn't necessarily mean that you want to see the light fixtures. If you want your landscape to appear to be magically lit without any visible fixtures, hiding the lights within shrubs is a great solution.
Lights that are hidden in shrubs can shine the light upward. This technique highlights not just the shrub but also the tree or house above or behind the shrub. Light can also shine out from within shrubs, lighitng flower beds or paths. There are lots of clever ways to hide light fixtures within the dense foliage of shrubs. Using the way that shrubs are trimmed can even cast light as desired.
Create Silhouettes
Shrubs are unique in the shapes that they can create. While occasionally shrubs are left to grow somewhat wild, most of the time they are carefully shaped. These shapes are perfect for lighting that creates silhouettes.
Highly structured topiaries in the shapes of cones, circles, or even objects can be lit to create silhouettes that appear striking and artistic. Even simple shrub shapes like the long rectangles of hedges can be silhouetted to a charming effect.
In Front of the Shrub Lighting
Lighting that shines from in front of the shrub is very useful for generally lighting a space. It is perfect for areas that have flowers or low plants, shrubs, and then taller trees.
Such lighting can allow you to enjoy the beauty of a well-planted area at night as well as during the day. Lighting in front of a shrub can also create shadows on a wall behind the shrub, an effect that can be quite remarkable. If you want to highlight the colors of a shrub, lighting the shrub from in front is probably the best way to do it.
Lighting from Above
Lighting that shines down from trees onto shrubs can replicate the effect of moonlight while simultaneously highlighting a shrub. This is a great way to signify where a grassy area or a path ends and the shrubbery begins.
It can be very subtle, so that you may not even realize at first glance that the area is artificially lit. This is perfect lighting for a grassy yard or a garden path.
Lighting From Below
Lighting a shrub from below can create a fascinating effect that works especially well for shrubs that have interesting structural shapes. The lighting can shine up into the branches of the shrub, making it look like a miniature tree.
In the dark, when a sense of size and scale can be thrown off easily, this effect can be extremely interesting. It is also very easy to hide the light when you light shrubbery from below.
Why Choose Landscape Lighting for Shrubs?
When you are choosing what landscape lighting you want in your yard, landscape lighting for shrubs is probably not the first kind of lighting that comes to mind. However, shrubs should not be overlooked when you are picking the landscape lighting that you want in your design. Here are some of the reasons why landscape lighting for shrubs is a great option:
Bring Some Color to Your Landscape at Night
One of the reasons that shrubs work so well in landscapes is because of the awesome colors that they can bring to a space. Many types of shrubs have brilliantly colored leaves, while other shrubs are rich in flowers.
Landscape lighting can do a great job of emphasizing the best colors in your shrubbery. Whether you are highlighting bright reds and yellows or silver color and velvet texture, the right landscape lighting can make the color of shrubs stand out even more at night than they do during the day.
Light up a Perimeter Tastefully
Shrubs are often used for perimeters. They are much more attractive than fencing, but they can be just as effective for creating privacy.
Whether your perimeter has only shrubs or a combination of shrubbery and fencing, using landscape lighting on perimeter shrubs is a great way to make it clear where your perimeter is. It can make the edge of a lawn or provide security lighting so that nobody can enter your property without being lit up. It is also a great way to provide a backdrop for landscape lighting used on the rest of your garden
Superb Path Lighting
Shrubs very often accompany paths, since paths and shrubs are natural complements of one another. The structure of a path works beautifully with the structure of a trimmed hedge.
Since shrubs are typically regularly trimmed, they can easily be kept from interfering with a pathway. Lighting the shrubs along a path along with the path itself is a very logical and attractive way to utilize shrub landscape lighting.
Should You do Landscape Lighting for Shrubs Yourself or Hire a Professional?
Once you have decided that landscape lighting for shrubs will work well in your space, your next question is sure to be whether to hire someone to install landscape lighting for you or do it yourself. Here are a few points to help you make your decision:
- A professional has the experience to make it look good. There are a lot of decisions to be made in landscape lighting for shrubs. You may be asking yourself how bright should lights be or how many lights does a shrub need? The answer will vary dramatically depending on what you're trying to do. You may be amazed by how many hours you can spend trying to create an effect and how hard it can be to get the look you’re going for.
- Installing landscape lighting for shrubs incorrectly can be dangerous. Even low voltage landscape lighting comes with some meaningful risks. Lighting up shrubbery can be especially dangerous because the lights are so often hidden among the foliage, which can become quite dry and create a fire risk. Furthermore, shrubs frequently need to be trimmed, and putting landscape lights in the wrong place can make it very easy to accidentally hit them with a hedge clipper.
- Professionals have more lighting options at their disposal. Your local gardening center or big box store may have a wide range of landscape lighting available, which may cause you to think that you have plenty of options to create exactly the effect that you want. However, in reality, you will find yourself very limited by the do-it-yourself lighting options at your disposal. Professionals have many more options to create a stunning look that doesn't have issues like fading out at the end of the lighting line.
Choose the Best Landscape Lighting Services Near Me
American National Sprinkler & Lighting has been installing landscape lighting for shrubbery and other aspects of the home or business landscape since the early 1980s. We have the experience and equipment necessary to do a superb job of installing your landscape lighting for shrubs.
We are happy to speak with you about exactly what you want from your shrubbery lighting to make sure that your needs are met. We can also make suggestions based on our extensive experience about what will work best in your space. We’ll keep working with you until your landscape lighting is exactly what you want it to be.
Talk To A Professional Today
Our system continues to work great, and we always appreciate getting the phones calls to let us know when it is time to schedule the opening and the closing of our system. Andres and his partner do a terrific job putting our system to bed in the fall, and opening it up again in the spring, noting any work that might need to happen before we can begin to water again the next season.
Erica RegunbergOctober 16, 2019