It’s only halfway through December, and you still have time to do some spectacular holiday yard decorating! The following suggestions are simple and economical. At Mirage Landscaping, Calgary’s most trusted landscape design company, we certainly encourage getting into the spirit!
Some holiday lighting tips derived from over three generations of winter service to our customers include:
1. Seasonal lights can be used to enhance wintertime safety as well as look pretty!
Lights hanging from eaves look lovely, but it can be dangerous to climb up and down a ladder to affix them. Break with the convention that says holiday lighting should taken down following New Year’s Day by making them functional and integrating them into illuminating both your landscaping and your walks during the long nights until spring…and into summer! Choose colours of lights that are non holiday-specific and work well together while also throwing useful amounts of illumination. You can keep your guests from slipping or tripping on steps or stones while treating them to your own sparkling wonderland.
2. Use your rocks, walls, trees and shrubs to maximum effect.
By using net lights on the shrubs, cut down rose bushes, retaining walls, etcetera, and wrapping vertical items such as the mailbox, trees, pergolas or other decorative structures, with traditional strings of lights, you can create a spectacle that features what is called depth of field.
3. Throw the light at night, shut it down during the day.
Just as with indoor bulbs, incandescent Christmas lights throw as much heat as light, making them especially inefficient when numbering in their hundreds. A more environmentally sound choice is to use LED lighting.
If you are wanting your holiday lighting efforts to be functional for the safety of your property, it is important to remember that the large bulbs, whether incandescent or LED, will supply far more light on one single strand than multiple strings of the standard sized mini lights.
No matter what type of lights you chose, Mirage Landscaping suggests our Calgary area customers employ a timer or two to deal with turning the lights off and on. Setting up a timer just once will spare you from accidently leaving the lights burning during the day, or all weekend long, or when you take a trip to Grandma’s house for Christmas.
4. Remember, the snow hides what you did.
As you know, Mirage Landscaping spends our winters in Calgary performing full service snow removal for our clientele. We have every hope that if your Christmas masterpiece has hidden features that you tell us before we fire up the snowblower!
