West-facing garden: afternoon and evening sun

A west-facing garden gets the sun from around midday until the evening. In a London June, with a clear view to the west, that means sun on the patio until after 9 pm, because the midsummer sun sets in the north-west at a bearing of 311°, not due west.

Opens Leathwaite Road, Battersea, at 7 pm on 21 June. The street runs north to south, so houses on its west side have west-facing gardens.

When the sun arrives

The back wall faces west, so it gets no direct sun until the sun passes due south at solar noon. In London that's 13:03 BST in late June, 12:09 GMT at the March equinox and 11:59 GMT in late December. Before then the house shades the garden, but the shadow shrinks through the morning, so the far end gets sun first.

With the house as an 8 m wall and nothing else around, a spot 20 m down the garden is in sun from about 07:30 in June and 10:00 in December. The patio by the back door waits until lunchtime all year round.

Why summer evenings last so long

In London on 21 June the sun sets at 21:22, at a bearing of 311°. That's about 40° north of due west, so for the last couple of hours it shines along the garden at an angle rather than straight down it. At the equinoxes it sets almost exactly west (271°) at around 18:13 GMT in March, and on 21 December it sets in the south-west (232°) at 15:54.

Evening sun is also very low. At 20:00 on midsummer's day the London sun is 9.8° above the horizon. At that angle a 2 m fence casts a shadow about 11.5 m long, and a house casts one far longer. So whether you actually get those evenings depends on what stands to the west of you.

What's behind the garden decides the evening

Here's the middle of a 15 m garden (10 m from the house) in London, first on an open plot, then backing onto another 15 m garden with an 8 m terrace beyond it, so the two rows of back walls are 30 m apart.

Calculated with SunCalc, the formulas the map uses, in 10-minute steps. The terrace behind takes almost three hours of June evening away and leaves the garden in shade by about half past six. A low garage, a wide gap between streets or a bungalow behind gives the opposite result: sun until close to sunset.

That's the thing to check before you buy for the evening sun. Stand in the garden in summer around 7 pm, or look at it on the map.

Living with a west-facing garden

A table at the far end usually holds the last of the sun, since the shadow from your own house grows out towards it from the back wall. In hot weather the opposite applies: a west-facing patio gets its sun when the air has already warmed up, so it can be the hottest spot of the day, and some shade from a parasol or pergola helps.

Warm west-facing walls are a classic spot for trained fruit and plants that want heat. And because the garden is in shade in the morning, plants avoid the quick thaw after a frost that causes trouble in an east-facing garden.

South of the equator a west-facing garden behaves in much the same way. The only real change is that the summer sun sets in the south-west there, not the north-west.

Check your own garden

Search your address, set the date to around 21 June and drag the time slider from 17:00 towards sunset. You'll see exactly when the houses behind you take the sun. Switch to Sun hours and tap or hover a spot for its total for the day, and compare it with the six-hour full sun mark. For gardens that point more south-west, the south-facing guide is the closer match.