Effective Lighting Solutions for your Backyard

Having a beautifully landscaped backyard is one thing, but equally important is having your space effectively lit. While backyards provide several benefits, such as engendering family gatherings, providing entertainment for you and your loved ones, or simply being your space of escape and more; a backyard lighting system will paint the finishing details to your landscape. Just like how landscaping contributes to the aesthetic and value to your home, lighting can enhance and highlight desired features while creating that perfect ambiance for your guests. Keep reading for benefits and tips on how you can enjoy your backyard night or day with key lighting concepts and more.

Various Backyard Lighting Benefits

Aesthetics: Well positioned backyard lighting can enhance any landscape. A backyard lighting system helps magnify the different textures, while complimenting varying features and shapes of your structures, shrubs and trees. The addition of lighting will expand beautify the spatial views. By varying lighting hues and intensity you can establish mood and ambience for an evening of entertaining, parties, romance, etc.



Safety: Another primary function of backyard lighting is to illuminate possible hazard areas. These may include steps, low branches, water features, barriers, abrupt changes in path directions, elevation changes, and more.



Security: Your backyard surrounds your home. Typically, people have many valuable items in their yards, for example fancy statues and figurines, elegant water fountains, bamboo tiki bar stocked with pricey liquor and stem-ware, expensive pool toys, and etc. Backyard lighting can protect your valuables from unanticipated accidents or potential intruders. A well lit home and garden can help deter crime, while providing a clearer view at night on who is coming and going from your property.

Usability: The outside landscape is an extension of the inside of your home. Having a well lit area allows you enjoy that space regardless of whether it is day or night.

Entertainment: You can continue to enjoy gatherings in your backyard as dusk rolls in, instead of everyone packing up and heading inside at the first sign of nighttime. Everyone can relax outside in your beautifully landscaped backyard and enjoy themselves under the star-lit sky. Imagine sitting around your bamboo tiki-bar with a colorful array of stringed lights cascading along the roof and counter-top. In addition to that, little lights that gently illuminate along your patio and walkway so guests can see where they are going as they journey and marvel through your landscape. What an extraordinary and gratifying ambiance! Everyone will love getting together in your backyard.



Backyard Lighting Tips

Uncomplicated Systems: When it comes time for you to select your backyard lighting system, you should be careful to select lighting fixtures that are easy to install. You don’t want systems that have complicated electrical cables and connections as you want to compliment your landscape and not have to reinvent everything to do so.

Automated Timers: A good idea is to choose an outdoor lighting system that has an automated timer integrated into them. This way the timers regulate the duration and periods that the lights will be on and off, which makes it easier and convenient. You can even get solar powered lighting systems, which will absorb energy from the sun during the day so that they illuminate at night for your safety and enjoyment. This will also save you money on utilities.

Plan Your System: Be sure to plan out your backyard lighting system. There are so many systems to choose from and unique fixtures you can add to your décor, you should make a plan for your backyard lighting so you don’t overspend or get fixtures that don’t fit well with your decorating scheme.

Some Questions to Ask Yourself: How much do you want to spend on your backyard lighting system? How much backyard space do you have? How much brightness do you want? Do you have any specific features, such as a water fountain or sculpture, you want to enhance? Do you have any paths or areas where people will need to be able to see where they are walking? How will you install your lights? Do you want to hang stringed lights, for example around your patio covering or bamboo tiki bar, or do you want stand alone lights, for example light posts and spot lights?

Cool Landscaping Design Tips and Ideas

Creating a tropical landscape is a rewarding and creative task, but finding and purchasing your ideal landscaping products and tropical décor is only half the battle of creating the ultimate tropical paradise in your home and yard. The other half is the actual work involved in landscaping. There are so many different landscaping ideas and methods you can use with colorful plants, bamboo fencing, a tiki bar, umbrella thatches, tiki statues, and all other bamboo and tropical-themed products. Keep reading to learn more about some cool landscaping tips and ideas for your home and yard that will help you in your planning.

Benefits of Landscaping

In addition to being beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, landscaping your home and yard adds enjoyment and value to your home. Landscaping has proven to be one of the top ways to add monetary value to one’s home. Additionally, depending on the particular landscaping project and the amount of continued maintenance and upkeep, landscaping can even appreciate over time.

Landscaping Tips and Ideas

Plan before you Buy. This may sound tricky, but it’s an important step when landscaping. Simply sketch your ideal landscape design on paper before you start buying, planting, and building your new yard. This will enable you to make smart purchases by knowing exactly what materials you need and where you’re going to put them. Planning your landscaping project can save you time, money, and unnecessary frustration.



Build Boundaries. Walls and fences are generally a necessity for every home and yard. But, you don’t want boring old fencing or concrete cinderblocks as your barriers. Instead, you can create a beautiful landscape and tropical paradise through the use of bamboo poles and bamboo fencing. Additionally, you can use various plants, shrubs, and trees for barriers.

Add Waterworks. Not only does a beautiful water feature add a pleasant ambiance with the sound of trickling water, but water features are also extremely pleasing to the eye, can add value to your home, and are elegant. You can add a beautiful waterfall, fountain feature, or small pond to your tropical décor. If you opt for a pond, you can even buy colorful fish to enhance your water feature. Just be sure to maintain whichever water feature you add to your landscape.

Color is your Friend.



Adding color to your landscape will do wonders. And, it’s surprisingly very inexpensive. In fact, for as little as $1.00 a plant, you can blanket your yard with petunias, daisies, and other small annuals that will flower throughout the growing season. Color is a highly defining characteristic in tropical landscapes. Attractive colors will surely enhance the tropical theme in your home and yard.

Foliage is Fun. Interesting, eye-catching, and distinctive foliage can add variety and appeal to your yard. You can replace plants that don’t flower, replace flowers that are difficult to maintain, or simply add foliage to your current landscape. Examples of fun foliage include:



Flowering Crabapple Trees



Cutleaf Japanese Maples

Keep your Grass Nourished. Healthy, green, lush grass is always an easy and popular idea for any landscape. To reach optimum nourishment, you can implement regular fertilizer treatments and maintain a watering schedule. You can also keep that unwanted crab grass and those nagging weeds out of your lawn by adding a weed killer to your fertilizer treatment.

Bamboo and Tikis Tropical Décor

At Bamboo and Tikis, we have an extensive selection of top-quality landscaping products and tropical décor. Whether you are looking for bamboo fencing to create an aesthetically pleasing wall around your yard, a unique tiki bar for fun and entertainment, or other tropical landscaping products, Bamboo and Tikis has the products for you. So, get started on adding value and beauty to your yard by turning it into the ultimate tropical paradise. Browse our web site or come on in to our grand showroom in San Diego which offers 65,000 square feet of bamboo and tropical products galore.

Transformations from the Outside In

“Home, the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest” ~ Robert Montgomery

Throughout our daily bustles, fighting traffic, hours at work, and running errands, coming home is like dropping the heavy baggage and falling into a comforting place of reprieve. Many times, in efforts of revamping the home, people forget about landscaping and think mainly towards renovations or adding a pool. Although it may appear that landscaping only serves an aesthetic purpose, one can get so much more value from planning and cultivating a land area that includes real estate equity, monetary gain and personal benefits as well.



Whenever enhancing a home, the initial thoughts generally gear towards renovating, either a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, patio, or adding a pool. Working from the inside out, since landscapes aren’t considered as functional as the innards of a house, financially conscious planners will head there first. The truth is though, enhancing your landscape can be more cost effective than renovating, and can yield a higher return. Studies have shown that home owners can actually earn back anywhere from 100-200% of their landscape investment, whereas renovations to the kitchen earn about 75-125%, bathrooms 80-120%, patios/decks 40-70% and pools 20-50%. The common misconception with when homeowners spend large sums of money on a swimming pool is that it will add an aesthetic and functional appeal to a home, but forget about the cost of heating the pool, maintenance, water, and safety for kids and pets.

During our current tough economical times, where real estate isn’t as flourishing as it was, it is of interest to home owners to get the most value out of their property as possible. Often times, a well maintained and attractive backyard suggests to buyers that the home is just as well cared for. Event though you may not be looking to sell, the higher value your home is worth means the more equity you will have.

Another gain from landscaping that includes being earth friendly along with saving money is how certain landscape details can reduce utility fees by 25%. Structures and additions such as trees, thatch kits, umbrella kits, or other bamboo products, can provide shade by absorbing sun rays, or deflect wind during cold wind-chills.



The other side of landscaping is that it doesn’t have to be expensive. By using quality and inexpensive materials such as bamboo, you can create a dynamic aesthetic to your property without breaking the bank. Renovations, although can be helpful and practical if needed, can cost more in the long if additional work to electrical wires, or removing or adding walls, and consulting various specialists for certain tasks.

The truth is when creating your sanctuary of solace; the project is ongoing and may never be complete. This process should be a positive one that grants you satisfaction in seeing the fruition of your work, planning and investment. Similarly to why we take vacations, your home and garden should provide you with that same sense of relaxation.

Items such as garden statues, tiki statues, bamboo fencing and water fountains can provide your backyard with colorful blooms of texture and visual aesthetics to invigorate your senses.