Deck Lighting in Kennedy Heights, OH

The obvious thing to do with a big tree over a deck is light it. A fitting at the base throwing up into the crown is the standard move in every garden lighting scheme, and on the lots in Kennedy Heights (ZIP 45213) that carry a mature black walnut it is worth saying plainly that it does not work.

A walnut canopy is dense, and its leaf is a deep matte green that absorbs far more than it returns. Light thrown into one goes in and very little of it comes back out, so what you get for the fitting is a dull glow somewhere in the middle of the tree and nothing on the deck. A honey locust or a birch with an open habit and a pale leaf does the opposite, which is why the technique has the reputation it has. The tree decides it, and this one is at the wrong end of the range.

What works instead is treating the canopy as a ceiling instead of as a subject. It is already doing something useful: it holds warm light in under it and stops it escaping to the sky, so a deck under a walnut needs noticeably less output than the same deck in the open to feel enclosed and finished. The fittings all sit low and face down, the trunk gets grazed at close range if there is a reason to, and the crown stays where it is.

The trunk is worth a sentence, because it is the part of a walnut that repays light. The bark is deeply furrowed and dark, and a narrow beam held tight against it from a few feet away picks out that texture and gives the deck a tall lit object without any of the light going where it will not come back from.