North-facing garden: is it always in shade?

No. Near the house a north-facing garden is shaded for much of the year, but in summer the far end can get as much sun as any garden on the street. What decides it is how long the garden is compared with the shadow your house casts.

Opens the Sun hours view on Newport Road in Chorlton, Manchester. It runs roughly east to west, so the houses on its south side have north-facing gardens.

The house's shadow is the whole story

At solar noon the sun is due south, directly behind a north-facing house, so the shadow points straight down the garden. Its length is the height of the house divided by the tangent of the sun's angle above the horizon. Call a two-storey terrace 8 m tall to the top of the roof. Real roofs slope away from the back wall, so treat these lengths as the upper end.

In June the lunchtime shadow reaches less than 5 m, so in a 10 m garden the back half is in sun at midday. At the equinoxes it stretches to around 10 or 11 m, which covers most town gardens. In December it runs past 30 m, longer than almost any garden behind a terrace, and Manchester's lower sun makes every figure a little longer than London's.

Summer sun arrives from the north as well

The midsummer sun doesn't stay in the south. On 21 June it rises in the north-east and sets in the north-west, and in London it's on the north side of the house until about 08:20 and again after about 17:40 BST. During those hours it shines straight into a north-facing garden, right up to the back door.

Put the two effects together and you get this, for London, with the house as an 8 m wall and nothing else around:

The patio 3 m out gets its June sun in two blocks, roughly 05:00 to 10:00 and 16:00 to 21:15. The spot 10 m out is in sun from sunrise to sunset in June, then drops to nothing at the equinox, because it sits right at the edge of the noon shadow. Twenty metres out keeps direct sun until late October and gets it back in February. Between about mid-November and early February even that far end gets none.

The model leaves out side fences, extensions and trees, which take hours off, especially early and late in the day when the sun is low. Use it to understand the pattern, then check your own plot.

Planting for a north-facing garden

Think of it as two gardens. The far end, if it's long enough, is a summer sun trap: the place for a bench, a table, and the flowers or vegetables that need full sun from late spring to late summer.

Near the house, pick plants that cope with shade. Ferns, hostas, hellebores, foxgloves and Japanese anemones are long-standing choices for shady borders. For a north-facing wall, climbing hydrangea and ivy are both well known for doing well without sun. Lawns tend to struggle in heavy shade, so many people pave or gravel the strip next to the house and keep the grass further out.

In the southern hemisphere, this is the sunny side

In Australia, New Zealand and South Africa the midday sun is in the north, so a north-facing garden is the one people look for. Everything on this page applies to a south-facing garden there instead. The south-facing garden guide has Sydney figures.

Check your own garden

Search your address, set the date to 21 June and switch to Sun hours. Tap or hover the patio and then the far end of the lawn to compare them. Then try 20 April and 23 September, which is when the length of your garden makes the biggest difference. Gardens that point north-east or north-west pick up extra morning or evening light; the east-facing and west-facing guides cover those hours.