North-facing gardens: how much sun do they really get?
The usual answer is two to four hours a day in summer, dropping to under an hour in winter. That is a fair average — but it assumes a house height and a garden depth that are probably not yours, and the honest range runs from almost nothing to most of the day.
What “north-facing” actually means
Worth pinning down first, because the phrase describes the garden, not the building — which is not obvious, and gets written about as though it were.
Stand on your lawn with your back to the back wall of the house and look down the garden. Whichever compass direction you are now facing is the garden's aspect. Facing north means a north-facing garden. A phone's compass app will tell you in about ten seconds.
Which way the front of the house points does not come into it, and neither does the direction of the street. Two houses on opposite sides of the same road have their back gardens on opposite sides, so one of them is north-facing and the other is south-facing — which is exactly what the label is for.
The useful part is what the label implies. If your garden is north of your house, then your house is south of your garden — the same fact said backwards. And in Britain and Ireland the sun spends the entire day somewhere in the southern sky, never the northern. So your house sits between the sun and your garden. That is the whole reason a north-facing garden is the shady one, and it holds wherever the house happens to be.
In the US? The North-Facing Yard guide covers the same ground with feet and Miami-to-Minneapolis numbers.
What if it faces north-east, or somewhere in between?
Most gardens do. Very few plots line up neatly with the compass, and an aspect of north-east or north-west behaves noticeably differently from due north — usually better. What changes is not so much the number of hours as when in the day they arrive, and that often matters more.
| Aspect | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Due north | The least sun of any aspect. What sun there is arrives early and late in summer, and barely at all in winter. |
| North-east | Morning sun, then shade from late morning onwards. Good for salad crops, which prefer gentle early sun; poor for sitting out after work. |
| North-west | Shaded morning, then sun from mid-afternoon into the evening. Often the more pleasant of the two to use, and the warmer, because it catches the sun after the ground has had all day to warm up. |
Your garden, rather than the three tidy cases
The planner on this site will tell you. Search your address, trace round your house and fences on the aerial photograph that comes up, and watch where the shadow actually falls — any hour, any day of the year, whatever odd angle your plot sits at. It is free and it takes a few minutes.
A table cannot do that, and no page of writing can — including this one. The answer depends on your own house, your own fences and your own plot. So take the numbers below as a starting point, not a verdict: they are averages, and yours will not be average. If you would rather work it out by hand than use the planner, there is a free method for that further down the page too.
The short answer
For a due-north garden in Britain or Ireland, here is roughly what to expect through the year.
| Time of year | Typical direct sun | Where it falls |
|---|---|---|
| Midsummer | 2–5 hours | Early morning and late evening, down the east and west sides — in midsummer the sun rises and sets well to the north, so it slips past the house at each end of the day. |
| Spring and autumn | 1–3 hours | Briefly at each end of the day, and only on the parts of the garden furthest from the house. |
| Midwinter | 0–1 hour | Often none at all. The sun never climbs high enough to clear the roof. |
Those are the numbers most gardening sites will give you, and they are a reasonable starting point. The rest of this page is about why your own garden may sit at either end of those ranges — or outside them.
Why the average is probably wrong for your garden
Most pages that answer this question will tell you, quite fairly, that the amount of shade depends on the height of your house and the size of your garden. Then they give you an average anyway, because one page cannot know those things about a million different gardens.
Here is the scale of what that average is hiding. At the latitude of London, the midday sun sits about 62° above the horizon at midsummer and about 15° at midwinter. That changes how far a building throws its shadow enormously:
| Place | Midday shadow, midsummer | Midday shadow, midwinter |
|---|---|---|
| London | About half the building's height | About 3.7 times its height |
| Manchester | About 0.6 times its height | About 4.3 times its height |
| Edinburgh | About 0.6 times its height | About 5.3 times its height |
Put a number on it. A fairly ordinary two-storey house with the ridge of the roof about 7 metres (23 feet) up will throw a midday shadow of roughly 3.7 metres — 12 feet — in the middle of summer in London. In the middle of winter, the same house throws that shadow about 26 metres, or 85 feet. Seven times further, from the same building.
Which is a difficult thing to picture from a number, and an easy thing to watch. Being able to see that swing happen on a photograph of your own garden, rather than trusting an average worked out for somebody else's, is the reason we built the planner in the first place.
So whether your north-facing garden is usably sunny or permanently dark comes down to a handful of things that are specific to you:
- How tall your house is. A bungalow and a three-storey terrace produce completely different gardens on the same plot.
- How long the garden is. A 30-metre garden has plenty of ground beyond the winter shadow. A 10-metre garden may have none at all.
- How high the fences and walls are. A 1.8-metre fence on the eastern boundary removes the early morning sun that a north-facing garden depends on in summer.
- What the neighbours have. A tall tree or a two-storey extension next door can matter more than your own house.
- How far north you are. Edinburgh and London are not the same problem, as the table above shows.
Working out your own figure
There are two honest ways to get a real number rather than an average.
The patient way, and it is free. Pick a spot in the garden, go out every hour from sunrise to sunset, and write down whether that spot is in direct sun or not. Add up the hours at the end. It genuinely works. The drawbacks are that it takes a full day you have to be at home for, it only tells you about that one spot, and it only tells you about that one time of year — which, as the shadow figures above show, is the part that changes most.
The quick way, and the reason this site exists. Search your address, and an aerial photograph of your own property comes up. Trace round your house, your fences, and any tree big enough to matter — it is a few clicks each. Then drag the time slider, and watch the shadow of your own house swing across your own garden, hour by hour.
That is the part that is hard to get any other way. You can see the shadow pull back off the top of the lawn through the morning, and you can see exactly where it stops — the line beyond which the bed never gets sun. Then drag the date to December and watch the same shadow stretch out and swallow the whole thing. It is the seven-fold difference from the table above, happening in front of you in about two seconds, on your garden rather than a diagram of somebody else's.
It takes a few minutes rather than a whole day, it covers every part of the garden instead of one spot, and it will show you midwinter in the middle of July.
If you are in the southern hemisphere, reverse all of this
Worth saying plainly, because almost every page written on this subject assumes Britain and does not mention it. In Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and South America, the sun spends the day in the northern half of the sky. A north-facing garden there is the sunny one — the equivalent of a south-facing garden in Britain — and it is a south-facing garden that sits in the shadow of the house.
The physics is identical, only mirrored, and the shadows are shorter because most of the southern-hemisphere population lives closer to the equator. At Melbourne's latitude a building throws a midwinter midday shadow of about 1.8 times its height, against London's 3.7. Southern-hemisphere gardens are more forgiving in winter for that reason alone.
What will actually grow there
A north-facing garden in Britain is not a write-off, and the plants worth putting in it are a longer list than people expect. Several salad crops and herbs genuinely prefer a few hours of gentle morning sun to a full day of it — lettuce and coriander bolt in strong sun, and are better off in your garden than in a sunnier one.
The full list, and an honest note on what a deeply shaded bed cannot do, is on the plants that cope with shade page. If your garden turns out to be sunnier than you feared, the seasonal growing guides cover what to put in through the year.
The one thing worth doing first
Before you buy anything, find out which parts of the garden get sun in winter, not summer. Summer is the forgiving season and almost any garden looks workable in June. The winter shadow is the one that decides where a permanent bed, a greenhouse, a washing line or a seating area should go — and it is the one you cannot observe on the day you are standing there in July.
The other aspects
Every garden on a street has a different one of these, and the differences are bigger than most people expect: