Outdoor lights can beautify your home and help keep it safe.

There are many reasons to design a lighting scheme for your landscaped areas. Carefully chosen and correctly positioned lights add beauty to your outdoor spaces, allow you to enjoy the lawn, deck or patio after dark, and can be an important element in your home security system. So how should you go about lighting the different elements of your yard?

Los Angeles native Paul Lewis is the owner of Paul A. Lewis & Associates Landscape Architecture, a company that designs and creates customs landscapes for residential, commercial, retail, entertainment, recreational, and educational facility projects. Here he offers some more great tips for lighting your landscaped areas:

• Add drama with a shadow.
  If you have a tree or statue in front of a wall or some other surface, shadowing is a nice way to add some drama. Place a recessed light fixture in front of the objects to create shadows on the surfaces behind them.
  
• Illuminate low beds.
  If you've landscaped your garden with flowerbeds and low shrubs, shrub lighting can let you enjoy these areas at night. Be sure to position fixtures so that they illuminate low-lying landscaping and ground cover.
  
• Down lights for security.
  Down lighting is a good choice for security lighting. Position bright spotlights near the roof of your home to illuminate larger areas, of your yard, driveway, or patio.
  
• Light paths for beauty and safety.
  To light a pathway, mount smaller fixtures near the ground. Path lighting not only beatifies your walks, but it also makes walking safer and adds to your home security.

For more about outdoor lighting, checkout the following websites:

HGTV: Curb Appeal Top 10: Lighting
www.hgtv.com

HGTV: The Seasoned Gardener: Lighting Your Landscape
www.hgtv.com

Architectural Lighting
www.lightforum.com

Hi-Tech Landscape Lighting
www.landscape-lighting.net