East-facing gardens: how much sun do they really get?
Sun in the morning, shade from early afternoon — roughly four to six hours in summer and an hour or two in midwinter. The hours matter less than when they arrive, which makes an east-facing garden excellent for some things and genuinely risky for others.
What “east-facing” actually means
Stand on the lawn with your back to the back wall of the house and look down the garden. Whichever compass direction you are facing is the garden's aspect, so if you are looking east, you have an east-facing garden. A phone's compass app settles it in ten seconds. It has nothing to do with which way the front door faces or how the street runs.
The sun rises in the east, so it comes to you first, over the back fence. Then it swings south through the middle of the day, and your own house moves into its way. By mid-afternoon the garden is in the house's shadow and stays there.
The short answer
| Time of year | Typical direct sun | When it arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Midsummer | 5–8 hours | From sunrise at about 04:48 until early afternoon. The best of it is over by two o'clock. |
| Spring and autumn | 3–5 hours | From around 06:00 to midday. Pleasant, gentle light — the aspect at its best. |
| Midwinter | 1–2 hours | A brief, weak window from about 08:12. The sun rises 40° south of east in December, so it barely reaches you before the house cuts it off. |
Why it changes so much between June and December
“The sun rises in the east” is only true twice a year. The rest of the time it rises well to one side of east, and at this latitude the swing is enormous — which is the single biggest thing to understand about an east-facing garden.
In midsummer the sun comes up 40° north of due east, almost behind the house, and an east-facing garden is lit from before five in the morning. In midwinter it comes up 40° south of east, already swinging towards the house, and there are only seven and a half hours of daylight to share out. Same garden, two different places.
Your garden, rather than the average
The planner on this site will tell you. Search your address, trace round the house, the fences and any trees, and watch where the shadow actually falls — any hour, any day of the year. It is free and it takes a few minutes.
It matters more here than for other aspects, because an east-facing garden's sun arrives early and low, when it is most easily blocked. A single tall thing on the eastern boundary — a neighbour's house, a conifer, a garage — can remove most of the morning and leave you with almost nothing. A table of averages cannot know that. A drawing of your own plot can.
The frost problem worth knowing about
This is the one genuinely important piece of advice for an east-facing garden, and most general guides skip it.
After a frosty night, plants thaw safely if they warm slowly. Early direct sun on frozen tissue thaws it fast, and the cells rupture — so the damage comes from the sunrise, not the frost. An east-facing wall or bed gets exactly that: the first sun of the day, straight onto plants that have been frozen all night.
The classic casualties are camellias and magnolias, whose flower buds brown off and drop. Long-standing advice is simply not to plant them where they will catch early morning sun in winter. The same goes for early-flowering fruit and tender new growth in spring.
What the aspect is genuinely good for
Once you know about the frost, the morning-sun pattern is a real advantage for a lot of things:
- Salad crops and leafy greens. Lettuce, spinach, rocket and coriander bolt — run to seed and turn bitter — in hot afternoon sun. Morning sun with an afternoon off is close to ideal, and an east-facing garden supplies it without any effort from you.
- Anything prone to mildew. Morning sun burns off the overnight dew early, and leaves that dry quickly get far less fungal disease. Roses and courgettes both benefit.
- Breakfast outside. Not a horticultural point, but it is the aspect's real pleasure, and the reason some people prefer it to west.
What it is poor for is sitting out after work — by six in the evening the garden is in shade even in July — and for heat lovers like tomatoes, aubergine and capsicum (peppers), which want the long afternoon warmth a west-facing garden gives them.
For the shadier corners, the list on plants that cope with shade is the practical companion to this page, and the seasonal guides cover what goes in when: spring, summer and autumn.
If you are in the southern hemisphere
East and west do not swap over the way north and south do. The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west everywhere on earth, so an east-facing garden still gets morning sun in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
What changes is the middle of the day: the sun crosses the northern sky rather than the southern, so the shadow of your house falls the other way as the day goes on. The morning is the same, the afternoon is not. The frost warning applies just as much, and matters in inland and southern Australian gardens more than people expect.
The one thing worth doing first
Find out what stands on your eastern boundary and how tall it is. For a north or south-facing garden the house is the main obstacle and you already know its height. For an east-facing garden the thing that decides your morning is somebody else's — and low early sun is blocked by things that would cast no useful shadow at midday.
The other aspects
Every garden on a street has a different one of these, and the differences are bigger than most people expect: