Most of what people picture when they think of landscape lighting comes up from the ground, a fixture sitting in the gravel pointed at a tree or a wall. That's uplighting and we do a ton of it. But the effect customers end up loving the most, when I can talk them into it, comes from the other direction.
We call it moonlighting. You mount a fixture high up in a tree and aim it down so the light comes through the branches and lands on the ground in this broken, dappled pattern, pretty much the way your yard looks on a bright full moon night. The first time a customer walks out to see it after dark there's usually a pause where nobody says anything, and I've learned to just let that happen.
What it does for a yard
Uplighting is for showing off one thing, the saguaro or the stone wall or the front of the house. Moonlighting doesn't really show off anything in particular. It lights an area, like the patio under a big mesquite or the walk out to the back gate, and it does it softly enough that you can see where you're going and still see stars over your head.
The shadows are what you're really paying for. Every branch throws one, and when a breeze comes through the tree they drift around on the ground a little, which is something I've never been able to get any other way.
Which trees work out here
You need a tree with real branch structure and a canopy the light can filter through. In the Valley that's mostly mesquite, palo verde and ironwood, plus some of the big ash and eucalyptus you find in older neighborhoods in Mesa and central Phoenix, and the occasional Aleppo pine that somebody let get huge. Mesquite is probably my favorite because the branches twist around so much that the shadows come out looking like lace.
Palms are the one everybody asks about, and they just don't work. A date palm or a Mexican fan palm has no branches, it's a trunk with a head on top, so there's nothing for the light to break up on the way down and you end up with a hard bright circle on the ground. Palms look great uplit, so leave them for that.
The tree has to be tall enough too. Under about fifteen feet the light doesn't have room to spread and it starts looking like a spotlight on a stage.
Getting a light up a tree without hurting it
This takes a crew and a tall ladder and on a big tree sometimes most of a morning. The fixtures usually end up somewhere between twenty and thirty feet up, tucked into a crotch or against the back side of a limb so you can't spot them from the patio, and the wire comes down the side of the trunk facing away from where people sit. We use mounts that can be loosened as the tree grows, and they get checked when we're out for maintenance, because a mount that fit perfectly three years ago can start biting into a limb if nobody pays attention to it.
Aiming is the slow part. I do it at night with somebody standing on the ground telling me what they see, because from up in the canopy I can't tell how the shadows are landing and moving a fixture a couple inches can change the whole pattern down below. It's a lot of "little more, no, back" shouted across a yard at nine o'clock at night, and I'm sure the neighbors enjoy it.
It's about the most dark-sky friendly thing we do
I wrote a post in July about Arizona's dark sky rules, and moonlighting fits right in with all of that since the light is pointed at the ground and the canopy catches most of what would otherwise spill up into the sky. Out in Fountain Hills or Cave Creek, where people moved partly to see the stars, it's usually the first thing I suggest for a backyard.
Anyway
It isn't cheap next to a few uplights stuck in the gravel, mostly because of the labor and all that ladder time, and it doesn't make sense in every yard. If your big tree is a palm, or nothing back there is over about fifteen feet, I'll tell you to skip it and we'll figure out something else. But if there's a mature mesquite or palo verde sitting out there in the dark every night, you're kind of wasting it.
— Sam
Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.