Landscape Lighting – Feature Trees 11:11 pm - June 13, 2019

Took a trip to Arizona for the Young Entrepreneurs Academy, for which I have been an instructor and business mentor for the past year. We went to attend Program Manager training and chaperone the Regional winner from HEB YEA.

While at the hotel, I noted that the landscape lighting, though nicely done, wasn’t coming on in some areas. Of course, I offered to help – exchanging a little barter here and there is always beneficial.

So I got the zones all working again, adjusting some time clocks and I found a few bad splices – just took part of an afternoon, and a little bit of an evening. See – now, these interesting feature trees can be seen in the courtyard.

By lighting this tree form 2 angles, we get to see the interesting angularity of the branches. Notice that one light is closer than the other. If you’ve ever looked at lighting for photography, it’s one a similar way – one light for “key,’ the other is for “fill.” The left light is the key light. Note that it is a bit closer and a bit brighter.

I changed the lamps from halogen to LED. For this application, I used Kichler retrofit drop in LEDs, and these are 4.5 watts – which is about equivalent to a 20-watt halogen lamp. I also turned the shrouds to better obscure glare for when a person is walking by on the sidewalk.

I like to get the whole canopy when at all possible, and so I angled these gimblesinside the fixtures to about 60 degrees, overlapping in the center, so all the leaves of this tree are illuminated. This type of accenting also looks great on crape myrtles, which are very popular in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

In the background, you can see some nice little pools of light in the plant material. This is a little ledge garden that is seen primarily from the hotel lobby.  I changed these lamps from halogen to LED and made them softer and more diffused at the edges – less harsh and more subtle.

Tree lighting can be a challenge, especially when it is in the center of a garden and the feature is the shape of the tree itself. There is sometimes a trick to doing this lighting. Please make your appointment with Elegance Outdoor Lighting to see how we light feature trees.