How to Highlight Palm Trees, Sculptures, and Focal Points at Night
Your pretty palms, elegant sculptures and soothing fountain make you happy during the day.
Then, poof, they disappear into the darkness after sundown. They’re out there wondering what they did to deserve this tragic neglect.
Landscape lighting extends your enjoyable time outdoors, especially when you have great stuff to gaze at and appreciate as you munch fajitas at your patio table, stroll your garden paths, splash in the pool, or even as you look out your kitchen window while scrubbing those pans. (Pro tip: why aren’t your kids doing the dishes?)
You’ll appreciate your striking palms and arty statues in a whole new magical light.
What’s the best landscape lighting for focal points? You’ll need more than one type of lighting. Think layers. You might need uplighting for trees; downlighting for statues; wall washing for that wide triple-trunk bottle palm; path lights to complement other lighting or to illuminate low-lying features.
Let’s learn more about outdoor accent lighting design, including:
Palm Tree Lighting Ideas: The Pros Use These Strategies
Palm trees are among the most dramatic landscape features when they’re professionally illuminated. They can give you actual chills, which is especially handy when the temperature is 110.
Some palm trees are so striking and dramatic you want them to be the highlight of your nighttime landscaping — the star of the show.
The Sylvester date palm with its distinctive diamond-cut trunk is a stunner. So is the foxtail palm with its big fluffy fronds that look like the bushy tail of a fox. Don’t forget the classic Maypan coconut palm, with rich green fronds that arch up and out, with coconut clusters showing off underneath.
How to highlight these beauties after dark? Say hi to uplights. Uplighting palm trees makes them as impressive at night as they are during the day. Maybe even more impressive.
Uplights do just what they say they do. They cast light up at a tree or statue from below.
If you have a great palm tree with textured bark or majestic fronds, uplighting will highlight it perfectly.
And they’re not one size fits all. Uplights are available in a variety of wattages to perfectly highlight the height and size of whatever you need to illuminate. It’s all custom designed for your unique landscaping.
Other pro tips for lighting palm trees:
Your designer will start by asking a few questions:
- Where will you view your pretty palm from most often? From your patio? The street? Inside your home?
- How big is your palm and how much of it do you want to light? Just the trunk, or the canopy, too?
- Are there orchids or a fern hanging from your tree that you want to highlight?
Your landscape lighting designer will use your answers to help create your unique lighting plan.
Other tips:
- Set fixtures back from the trunk a bit to wash the entire tree canopy in a soft glow.
- Or place fixtures close to the bark if you want to create dramatic shadow play on the textured surface.
- Use two opposing ground fixtures to eliminate flat shadows and create interest from multiple viewing angles.
- If the tree is tall and slender, one uplight can work. But a towering royal palm probably needs four lights to illuminate all sides.
- Color temperature matters. Stick to warm white LEDs so palm fronds look natural and not washed out.
- You often just need a low-key 3-watt bulb for a gentle wash of color on a palm. Avoid bright lighting that creates glare.
How to Highlight Sculptures at Night
Here at Tropical Gardens, we like downlighting for sculptures to perfectly illuminate the outside art.
One of our clients finds pockets in her landscaping to place sculptures. Then we swoop in and install garden sculpture lighting to add stunning appeal after dark.
We installed discreet downlighting in an overhead branch of her live oak tree to perfectly highlight one stunning statue.
Downlighting from above mimics soft moonlight cascading over the sculpture for a natural, elegant look.
Should you install downlighting in one of your palms to highlight a sculpture below? We don’t advise it. It’s too hard to disguise the wiring along those sleek palm trunks. It’ll be a distraction.
Garden Sculpture Lighting: Path Lights for Shorter Features
Path lights aren’t just for paths. Yes, their main gig is lighting your path, aiming the light down and to the side of the fixture so you don’t trip and fall.
But path lights work great for low-lying landscaping features, too, as they cast their light down.
One Tropical Gardens client has unique colorful flower sculptures that hug the ground.
Path lights illuminate them perfectly, sitting about 18 inches off the ground.
Tips for Lighting Taller Trees
- Is your tall palm up against your property line? If so, it will probably just need two uplighting fixtures to light just one side. But if it’s in the center of your front yard, you’ll want four to light it both from the street for curb appeal and so you can see it from inside your house — for living room appeal.
- Don’t forget the tree canopy. You might need one light shining up into the canopy and one lighting the trunk.
- Some homeowners like orchids or a fern hanging in the tree. You’ll want a separate lighting fixture focused on that.
Wall Washing for Palm Trees and Sculptures
Uplights, which can direct light as high as 30 feet tall, are great for your tall palm trees, but what about your height-challenged beauties?
Meet wall wash lighting, which spreads light in about an 8 by 8-foot area.
That makes this outdoor lighting technique great for shorter palms like a Pygmy date palm, with its dense, full crown of arching glossy, green leaves. Or a wide triple trunk bottle palm, with its cool curvy shape perfect for showing off. Or statues or fountains that fit within that 8 x 8 space.
Just like its name suggests, wall washing offers a soft “wash” of light, casting a soft, even illumination over your landscaping feature.
When uplighting produces too much light for smaller features, wall washing with a 4-watt bulb can be just right.
Outdoor Accent Lighting Design: Why Hire a Pro
Sure, you can buy 50 solar-powered landscape lights at the hardware store for eight or 10 bucks a pop. Give us a call in six weeks when they stop working. Or when your statue of David comes to life and scolds you for making him look so lame at night.
Why let a pro do it?
- Lighting landscape focal points is trickier than it looks, involving wattage and color temperature. Too much wattage will wash out your sculptures and palm trees but if there’s too little, why bother?
- Where will a wall washer work best? Does your fountain need uplighting or downlighting?
- Quality matters. Your landscape lighting goes through a lot out there. We show up with quality fixtures made of cast brass, not cheap plastic. Our fixtures come with lifetime guarantees on the fixture housing, so you never have to worry about paying to replace them.
- When Tropical Gardens Landscape lighting pros wrap up your lighting job, they leave you with bulbs that have 55,000 to 60,000-hour warranties. If you turn them on at dusk and turn them off at dawn they’ll last about 14 years.
- When they’re lighting trees, skilled lighting pros leave a few extra feet of wire tucked away in their lighting installation to allow for nature to do its thing. Trees grow. Sometimes a root grows and pushes the wire up out of the ground. We leave extra feet of slack to allow for that. Would you think of that? (We’re not judging, just asking.)
Frequently Asked Questions About Landscape Lighting for Focal Points
Q: Which palm trees should I light?
A: Highlight your palms that have the most striking features, whether it’s the impressive diamond-patterned trunk of your Sylvester date palm or the fluffy fronds of your foxtail palm. If you have a triple-trunk palm, that’s worth illuminating, too. Don’t light everything. Think subtle, not showy. Light what’s special.
Q: Is one light enough to light a palm tree?
A: it depends. If the tree is tall and slender, one uplight can work. But a single spotlight on a wide or multi-trunk palm creates heavy, awkward shadows. Larger palms often need two to three balanced fixtures.
Q: Does the color of the sculpture affect what lighting you use?
A: It does. Dark surfaces absorb light and hide shadows, while light or reflective surfaces bounce light and reveal fine details more easily.
If your sculpture is black, dark bronze or dark wood, it may need brighter bulbs or closer fixture placement than a lighter sculpture of marble or light concrete. One more reason to put a pro on the job. They know this stuff.
Ready for Magical Lighting of Your Landscape Highlights? Talk to Us
It might be 110 degrees here in Sarasota, but it’s blissfully cooler at night.
Get out there and enjoy your beautiful landscaping.
Tropical Gardens offers expert, creative outdoor lighting services in Sarasota as part of complete landscape transformations.
Add skilled, professional outdoor lighting to your landscaping to highlight your favorite features and make your outdoor living magical.
Let’s get started.
Give us a call or fill out our form today! Our team of Sarasota designers will help you create outdoor lighting to make your outdoor life shine.
