South west facing garden

[MikeEhrmantraut]

Hello all, anyone with a south west garden who can tell me where their garden gets shade or sun please? Our current garden is approx 30-35ft and east facing. We get morning sun on the house in the morning, afternoon hot sun in the middle section and back of garden until 5pm then it's gone.

Our new house has a similar sized garden which we need to overhaul completely. It is quite hemmed in by other similar sized gardens. There's a huge but not densely foliaged tree on the other side of the rear fence.

Any ideas on whether we'll get good sun and if the tree or fences etc will pose an issue? I've done a google but it's all based on north, south etc. We love the sun so want to work our where we can plant sun loving plants and where to put a patio. Thank you!

Apologies for the ramble. Husband was chewing my ear off despite telling him I was posting on mumsnet!

Ours faces WSW. Very very sunny except in the morning. We’d like a bit more shade near the house on July afternoons, but the taller trees happen to be further down so we have a big umbrella for our patio table.

I obsessed about this when designing our garden!

You can try a calculator like this one www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london
It will tell you how far above the horizon the sun is each month and where it rises/sets.

If you have a few months then I’d just draw a sketch of your garden and plot it out. The sun is symmetrical around 24th Dec so roughly speaking shadows in sept=April, October=March etc.

Remember deciduous trees will be bare from nov-apr which allows some winter sun through.

If your garden is facing SW you will roughly speaking get sun in the bottom right in the morning, house right at midday and left house in the evening (from standing at back door). In summer the sun rises and sets further north so it may reach the left centre of the garden at sunset. In the winter it is lower and will probably set centre house. (This all depends on your latitude.)

Our back garden faces due west. In mid summer, the bottom of the garden gets sun from early in the morning, by lunchtime the entire garden is in full sun and by late afternoon the sun shines directly in the house windows and the patio gets really hot. Something else to bear in mind is that in the UK, the prevailing wind tends to come from the south west, so it will blow up the garden directly towards the house. The plus point is that the house will shelter it from the coldest winds in winter from the NE or E.