Without bright, natural sunlight to showcase your landscaping features, your gardening efforts go unnoticed at night. Landscape lighting systems illuminate your outdoor space, drawing attention to your hard work, and can also help deter unwanted intruders. You can use colored lights to accent green foliage and landscaping features such as patios, gazebos, statuary, pools and retaining walls. White lights are best for featuring flowering plants because they allow you to see the full color intensity of the flowers. You can purchase new colored halogen or LED bulbs or simply purchase colored lens covers to change the color of existing lights.
Use green or bluish-green colored lights to accent green shrubs, trees, groundcovers and grass. Avoid using yellow lights, which can wash out dark green foliage; blue lights look strange unless used to accent blue-green foliage.
Accent plants with yellow-green foliage with yellow lights to intensify the yellow hues in the leaves.
Install red and orange landscaping lights around plants at the far side of your yard to provide a fire-like ambiance when you view the plants from across the yard. This effect doesn't work for plants around your patio, where they will usually be viewed up close.
Direct a colored spotlight upward toward tree canopies to cast a colorful silhouette. If you have several ornamental trees in your yard, you can use a different color light to highlight each tree. Experiment with the angle of the light and the distance from the base of the tree to achieve the larger and smaller silhouettes.
Place your choice of colored spotlights or floodlights in the rear of a flower bed to provide a back light for shrubs and flowers.
Wrap tree trunks and shrubs with colored strand lights, choosing from a single color or multicolored light strands. Other places to use strand lights include planters and around patio furniture to light the patio without the need for bright flood lights.
Add colored solar-powered path lights along the top of retaining walls, pathways, patios or among short plants, such as in an annual flower bed. These short, lantern-style lights have a pointed tip that you can simply push into the ground for easy installation. These lights work best in full sun, with about eight hours of sunlight daily to charge the lights.
Accent your flower beds with various small, colored stake lights. Among the various options are twinkling glass colored lights shaped like butterflies, dragonflies, frogs and other creatures. You can also find colored fiber-optic lights that spread open, creating a fountain-like spray of color among your flowers.
Replace the white light in a pool with a colored light. You can choose a single color or look for color-changing lights to brighten up your night swims. If you have a fountain or pond instead of a pool, look for submersible fountain lights to add a colorful glow to the water.
Hang strands of colored garden lanterns inside a gazebo or over your patio to provide subtle lighting for outdoor entertaining. Options include large colored globes, square lights and white lights with colored paper coverings to provide the desired color. Single lanterns look great suspended from the center of a gazebo or hanging from tree branches.
- Your neighbors will thank you for switching to colored landscaping lights instead of white lights because white lights produce about six times more light pollution than colored light alternatives.
- Solar powered lights require no electrical installation, while 12-volt lighting systems require electrical wire installation and a transformer to control the various lights that make up your landscape lighting system.