How To Light A Sego Palm

SEGO PALMS are among the most difficult landscape plants to accent, in my opinion. Personally, I think the sego palm is a very attractive plant, but I also think it could be considered the “joke” of the palm tree world. Normally when you think of palm trees, you think tall, skinny trees with leaves at the top. Then you see a sego palm - which is very short and wide and quite dense.

When lighting the usual palm tree like a date palm or a sabol palm, you’ll often see two “bullet” lights shining up the trunks and illuminating the tree and canopy. These fixtures will usually use a narrow beam to really make the canopy pop. But what about our humble short, squatty sego palm? Surprisingly, it seems that I always see that same bullet light method used for these trees – as though every palm can be illuminated exactly the same way, which just gets all over me! Using this standard “palm tree lighting” method simply won’t work on a sego palm. Although it could be illuminated with a bullet light pointing at it from the side, it would have to be placed several feet away from the tree and use a much wider beam spread. Generally, I find these light fixtures positioned within a foot of the sego palm, and in this instance, there is only a round spot of light on the bushy tree and that’s it. Not attractive and certainly not enhancing these very interesting trees.

So, what is the best way to light a sego palm? My favorite way to do this is from above. Since these trees are short and wide, we can accent the entire canopy at one time when placing a fixture above the plant. Since the leaves are very dark and thick, the leaves will almost look like they sparkle at night when a soft breeze blows through. There is also a much lighter colored center that looks very nice this way as well.

But what if there is no tall object to allow for down lighting? The next best thing would be to use a wash fixture which throws a very wide light beam. Even with these very wide pattern emitters, you may need more than one fixture, depending on the size of the tree and angles of visibility.

In another instance, let’s say that you happen to have a very old sego palm tree that has grown quite tall. Now, the tallest sego palm tree that I have ever seen was about 6’ tall, and I have only seen two of them that large. Maybe in California they are bigger? I don’t know, but here in central Texas, that’s the biggest I’ve seen. If you do come across trees that size, then you may want to use a couple of wash fixtures from below to accent the trunk and underside of the canopy, like the taller palm trees. But I still recommend using the very widest beam instead of the narrow beam bullet fixtures to get the best possible result.

Sego palms are not a very cheap tree and they really can become a nice focal point in the landscape when properly illuminated.  Please leave your comments below and if you would like more information on lighting palm trees, drop us a note at info@night-scenes.com