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Your Yard is a Canvas: Paint It with Light

By Kymberly Taylor

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is famous for his statement, “Less is more.” Lighting designers, many of whom are artists, agree. Architect, professor, and lighting designer Joe Rey-Barreau, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky, says, “The most successful lighting designs are those that you can’t see.” They must have the subtlety and drama of a great painting or piece of architecture. Path fixtures such as frogs, monkeys, and lanterns, though they may be beautiful and expensive, often have glass covers. These draw attention to the fixture instead of to what the lights are meant to illuminate.

He recently designed a lighting scheme as a surprise for the Queen of England, who sometimes stays on the farm of a friend of Rey-Barreau’s who raises thoroughbred horses. Over the years it has become a tradition for the queen and the professor’s friend to gather for aperitifs in his study, which has a giant Palladian window overlooking a garden and the horse fields. “As a surprise for the queen last year, we hid every fixture and lit trees with fascinating bark. We shadowed and highlighted sculptural, architectural trees,” Rey-Barreau says.

Try something you haven’t before. He suggests placing a small bulb right at the base of an unusual planting and aiming it horizontally rather than directing the light upward. “Subtle changes can make a dramatic difference.”

Annapolis and Eastern Shore pros note that lighting design and styles continue to evolve, though most homeowners’ needs can be met with three kinds of fixtures: up lights, which accentuate architectural details; path lights, whose objective is to push light downward so you can see steps and flowerbeds; and wall washers, which cast warm, soft light onto a wall. Because homes are becoming increasingly creative, with varying rooflines and textured materials, well-placed lighting of these kinds can make an elegant design even more compelling.

One Eastern Shore lighting specialist lined a quarter-mile, tree-lined driveway with low-voltage path lights. Instead of placing them on the ground he attached them to the trees for an unusual touch. Another landscaping company, specializing in hardscapes that complement pools and ponds, urges clients who are starting from scratch to integrate artful lighting, including up lights, right into their planning. If you’re going for the subtle look you’ll need to bury cables at least a foot beneath the ground. So when you’re planting trees why not bury a few cables and plant some lights, too? Lights can arc gracefully around a small garden, edge a pathway between the pool and the house, and illuminate steps. Focus a wall washer on an unusual garden wall, bench, or arbor.

Larry Lauck, vice president of communications at the American Lighting Association, like Rey-Barreau and Mies, cautions that a little light goes a long way. “There’s nothing worse than a neighbor who installs a streetlight in their back yard that lights up everything.” He says that cities that support the International Dark Sky Association, an organization that teaches people how to preserve the night sky, are passing ordinances to ensure that residential exterior lighting is contained. Though Maryland’s counties are aware of the association, they have not passed formal laws. However, if you are one of the growing number of residents who care about the visibility of the sky the best way to contribute to it is by casting your lights downward, he says. “A creative lighting designer can show you how to do this so you can still walk through a pathway and illuminate flowers, shrubs, and nice trees.”

Do not make the mistake most residents make: equating low-voltage outdoor lights with dim, inferior, cheap lighting, say area experts. Standard voltage is 120 volts; such lighting should be installed by a professional; Low-voltage landscape lighting uses approximately 12 volts.You can install such lighting yourself without fear of touching a live wire and getting electrocuted. However, today’s low-voltage systems can support fixtures that light a 75-watt lightbulb. This is not enough to illuminate a 150-foot tree, but it can brighten statues and mature plantings and bushes while cutting down your electricity bill.

What you do need to keep an eye on is solar lighting, which at the moment many find disappointing. Rey-Barreau explains that solar has not come into its own yet and that the capacity of the batteries is too small. “Solar just doesn’t work for me,” says one disgruntled Annapolis resident eager to be “green.” Rey-Barreau notes that a solar fixture will work fine, but after four or five days of clouds there is not enough energy stored in the system to power the fixture. No one is using solar in any serious way, he says. “We may be on the edge of it but it’s not here yet.”

If you want to investigate something that is here and that seems to have a bright future, try solid-state lighting, which uses the latest light-emitting diode (LED) technology, advises Rey-Barreau. Solid-state lighting begins with a silicon chip that’s very similar to what you have in your computer. Research is revealing that when a silicon chip embedded with a terabyte is electrified it glows very brightly. “It’s like putting an electric current into a rock . . . a light-emitting diode can last from 50,000 to 100,000 hours, which is as long as most of us will live,” he says. Its advantages are that it uses small amounts of energy and has no moving parts. One disadvantage, though, is in the color of the light emitted. “The white light is still somewhat bluish and looks a little unnatural,” explains Rey-Barreau. But, he notes, “This is a problem that, over the next five years, will be fixed. This is the wave of the future.”

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