South-facing gardens: how much sun do they really get?
The sunny one, and deservedly the one people pay more for — eight hours a day or more through the summer. The part that catches people out is winter, when an ordinary boundary fence can put the first seven metres of the garden into shade at midday.
What “south-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 south, you have a south-facing garden. A phone's compass app settles it in about ten seconds. It has nothing to do with which way the front door points, or which way the street runs.
What makes it the good aspect is simple enough. In Britain and Ireland the sun spends the entire day in the southern half of the sky. If the garden is south of the house then the house is behind you and out of the way, and the sun shines down the length of the garden instead of over the roof. The mirror image of this is the north-facing garden, where the house stands between the sun and the lawn all day.
The short answer
| Time of year | Typical direct sun | What it is like |
|---|---|---|
| Midsummer | 8–12 hours | Sun on the garden from mid-morning until late evening. There are over 16 hours of daylight to work with, and the midday sun is nearly 62° up. |
| Spring and autumn | 5–8 hours | The best stretch of the year for most gardeners — strong light without the scorching. |
| Midwinter | 2–5 hours | Only 7½ hours of daylight in total, the sun never climbs above about 15°, and anything on the south boundary throws a long shadow back into the garden. |
Those are averages for an open garden. What actually decides your own figure is what stands along the south boundary, and that is where two south-facing gardens on the same street stop resembling each other. The next section has the numbers, and the planner further down this page will work it out for your own plot.
The catch: the shaded strip along the bottom fence
This is the part most pages leave out, and it is the one that surprises people who have just moved in.
A south-facing garden is not shaded by your own house — your house is behind you. It is shaded by whatever stands along its southern boundary: the back fence, a hedge, or the neighbour's house on the street behind. And because the winter sun sits so low, those things throw shadows wildly out of proportion to their height.
| On the south boundary | Midsummer noon | Equinox noon | Midwinter noon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard 1.8 m fence | 1.0 m | 2.3 m | 6.7 m |
| 3 m hedge | 1.6 m | 3.8 m | 11.1 m |
| Neighbour's 7 m house | 3.7 m | 8.9 m | 26.0 m |
So a short south-facing garden with a two-storey house behind it can sit in shade all winter, despite having the aspect everyone wants. A long one with a low fence gets sun almost everywhere, almost all year. Same label on the listing, completely different gardens.
Your garden, rather than the average
The planner on this site will tell you. Search your address, trace round the fences, the house behind 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.
The figures above are midday shadows at London's latitude, for something standing square-on to the sun. Yours will differ with how far north you are, which way the boundary actually runs, and what is standing on it. That is the sort of thing a table cannot hold and a drawing of your own plot can.
The real problem is usually heat, not shade
Once you know which parts are sunny, a south-facing garden's real difficulty turns out to be the opposite of a north-facing one's. Beds dry out fast, and several crops that are supposed to love sun will bolt — run to seed and turn bitter — when they get too much of it in high summer. Lettuce, spinach, coriander and rocket are the usual casualties.
The answer is not to avoid the sunny beds but to use the shade you already have. That strip along the bottom fence is a nuisance in December and genuinely useful in July, and a side return beside the house often gives a few hours of shelter at the hottest part of the day. There is more on managing this in beating the heat, including when temporary shade cloth is worth the bother.
What to grow
Nearly anything, which is the whole advantage. Tomatoes, capsicum (peppers), aubergine, courgette, beans, sweetcorn and most fruit want every hour they can get, and a south-facing garden is where they finally ripen properly in a British summer. The seasonal guides cover the detail: spring, summer and autumn.
Then keep the shaded strip for the things that resent heat. The list on plants that cope with shade reads differently here — in a south-facing garden it is not a consolation prize, it is what you deliberately plant along the bottom fence.
If you are in the southern hemisphere, reverse this
Worth saying plainly, because nearly everything written on this subject quietly assumes Britain. In Australia, New Zealand and South Africa the sun spends the day in the northern half of the sky. There it is the north-facing garden that is the sunny one, and the south-facing garden that sits in the shadow of the house.
The fence problem is milder, too, because most of the southern-hemisphere population lives closer to the equator and the winter sun sits higher. At Melbourne's latitude that same 1.8 m fence throws a midwinter midday shadow of about 3.3 metres rather than 6.7.
The one thing worth doing first
Find the winter shade line before you build anything permanent. A south-facing garden looks uniformly brilliant in June, and June is exactly when people put a greenhouse, a raised bed or a seating area along the bottom fence — the one strip that will be in shade from October through March. It is a cheap mistake to avoid and an expensive one to undo.
The other aspects
Every garden on a street has a different one of these, and the differences are bigger than most people expect: