West-facing gardens: how much sun do they really get?
Shade in the morning, then sun from early afternoon until it sets — in midsummer that means light on the garden until after nine in the evening. It is the warmest aspect to sit in and the most demanding one to garden in, and those two facts have the same cause.
What “west-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 west, you have a west-facing garden. A phone's compass app settles it in ten seconds, and it has nothing to do with which way the front of the house points.
In the morning the sun is in the east, behind the house, and the house's shadow lies across the garden. As the day goes on the sun swings south and then west, clears the roof, and shines straight down the garden for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
The short answer
| Time of year | Typical direct sun | When it arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Midsummer | 5–8 hours | From around midday until sunset at about 21:12. Long, warm evenings — the aspect at its best. |
| Spring and autumn | 3–5 hours | From early afternoon until about 18:00. |
| Midwinter | 1–2 hours | A short window before the sun sets at about 15:48, 40° south of due west and very low. |
Why it changes so much between June and December
“The sun sets in the west” is only exactly true twice a year. The rest of the time it sets well to one side of west, and at this latitude the swing is large enough to change the garden's character completely.
In midsummer the sun sets 40° north of due west, so it comes round behind the house and keeps shining into the garden until after nine at night. In midwinter it sets 40° south of west at about ten to four, low and weak, with the house already shading most of the ground. 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.
The figure that matters most for a west-facing garden is the one no table can give you: what time in the afternoon the sun clears your own roof. That depends on how tall the house is and how long the garden is, and it decides everything from where the seating goes to whether tomatoes will ripen.
Why it is the warmest aspect to sit in
A west-facing garden feels hotter in the evening than a south-facing one, which surprises people. The reason is that the ground, the walls and the paving have had the entire day to absorb heat before the sun arrives. By six in the evening you have warm surfaces and direct sun at the same time.
It is why west-facing is the aspect estate agents quietly favour for entertaining, and why a west-facing patio stays comfortable long after the sun is off it.
The catch: afternoon sun is the harsh sun
The same warmth is hard on plants. Morning sun is gentle; afternoon sun arrives when air temperatures are already at their peak, so a west-facing bed gets its light at the most stressful time of day. In a hot summer the effects show up quickly:
- Beds dry out fast, and pots by a west-facing wall can need water twice a day in a heatwave.
- Leafy crops bolt. Lettuce, spinach, rocket and coriander run to seed and turn bitter. They would be far happier in an east-facing garden.
- Scorch on soft leaves, particularly on anything recently planted or recently watered.
None of this is a reason to avoid the aspect — it is a reason to water in the morning rather than the evening, and to give new plants a season to root before their first real summer. There is more in beating the heat, including when temporary shade cloth actually earns its keep.
What it is genuinely good for
Heat lovers, which is a long list. Tomatoes, capsicum (peppers), aubergine, chillies, courgette, beans and most fruit all want the long warm afternoons a west-facing garden gives them, and it is often where they finally ripen properly in a British summer. Late crops benefit too, because a west-facing garden holds its warmth further into autumn than an east-facing one.
The seasonal guides cover the detail: spring, summer and autumn. For the shaded morning strip near the house, see plants that cope with shade — that is where the salad crops should go.
If you are in the southern hemisphere
East and west do not swap the way north and south do. The sun sets in the west everywhere on earth, so a west-facing garden still gets afternoon and evening sun in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and it is still the warm one to sit in.
What changes is the middle of the day, when the sun crosses the northern sky instead of the southern, so your house's shadow travels the other way. The afternoon is the same; the morning is not. The heat warning above applies with a good deal more force in an Australian summer than a British one.
The one thing worth doing first
Work out what time the sun clears the house in high summer, and put the seating where it lands. A west-facing garden has one genuinely excellent stretch of the day, and the difference between a patio that catches it and one that misses it by four metres is the difference between using the garden in the evening and not.
The other aspects
Every garden on a street has a different one of these, and the differences are bigger than most people expect: