Are We Going to Have to Create More Shade in Our Gardens?

Sunshine has traditionally been one of the things British gardeners value most.

Estate agents advertise south-facing gardens. Gardeners hunt out the spot that gets the longest hours of sun and save it for roses, vegetables or a seat. Trees get reduced because they cast too much shade, shrubs get lowered to let in more light, and plants tolerant of a north-facing wall get described almost as consolation prizes. The sunny garden has generally been the desirable garden. Shade is something we inherit, tolerate, or try to overcome.

I'm starting to think that might have to change.

During spells of extreme summer heat, sunshine stops feeling quite so precious. The patio gets too hot to sit on. Pots heat up, compost dries out fast, and leaves scorch on plants that have always been billed as suitable for full sun. The lawn goes brown, and the exposed soil bakes hard enough to resist a trowel. We respond by watering — the pots, the borders, whatever's collapsed against a south-facing wall — and then we water it all again because the heat's stripped out most of what we just gave it. If watering's restricted, we're carrying cans around making increasingly hard decisions about what can be saved.

There'll always be times when plants need water, particularly while establishing. But if we keep having to pour in more water simply to compensate for how much heat a garden is soaking up, it's worth asking whether water is really the only part of the design that needs to change.

We've spent a great deal of time looking for plants that'll tolerate hotter, drier summers. Sensible enough, but it puts the whole burden on the plant — we choose something tougher, put it in the same exposed spot, and hope it copes better than whatever struggled there before. There's another option. We could change the conditions instead.

Creating shade doesn't sound nearly as exciting as choosing plants. No flowers involved, and the result can take years to develop. But stopping the ground from getting so hot and exposed in the first place could do more for a garden than endlessly swapping in ever-tougher, ever-more-drought-tolerant species.

Shade isn't simply the absence of sunshine. It changes how a garden actually works. A canopy intercepts solar energy before it reaches the soil and the plants beneath it — surfaces stay cooler, moisture is lost more slowly, and people have somewhere more comfortable to sit. A plant sheltered from the most intense afternoon sun can cope in soil that wouldn't sustain it if it were exposed all day long.

That doesn't mean the whole garden needs to go dark. A garden made permanently gloomy brings its own set of problems, especially through a British winter. The more useful aim is variety — areas of sun, areas of shade, places where the light shifts through the day. Most plants don't force us to choose between total shade and unbroken sunshine — there's morning sun, afternoon shade, dappled light, seasonal shade, the brief shadow cast by taller planting, the deeper cover under evergreens. A garden holding several of those conditions gives both plants and people somewhere to retreat when the weather turns difficult.

Trees are the obvious way to create it, but not the only way. A small deciduous tree casts a surprisingly useful area of shade once its canopy fills out, and because it loses its leaves, the garden gets more light back through autumn and winter when the warmth is welcome. A large shrub can do much the same job at a lower height, especially if it's grown on several stems and gradually opened out underneath. That lower canopy may be all a small garden actually needs — we don't always require shade from something thirty feet tall. A shrub just above head height can shelter a seat, protect neighbouring plants and create a sense of enclosure without dominating the whole plot.

The position matters as much as the plant. We tend to push trees and shrubs to the boundaries because the centre of the garden feels too valuable to give up, which can leave a tree shading the neighbour's garden, a shed, or the least useful corner, while the patio right beside the house carries on baking. If shade is one of the reasons for planting something, we need to actually look at where its shadow will fall — watching the sun not once but at different times of day and through different seasons, since the fiercest heat often arrives from the west in the afternoon rather than from overhead at noon. A tree that does nothing for the garden at midday might be exactly the shelter needed by four o'clock.

Trees also take time, and the need for shade may be immediate. A pergola offers another route — some broken shade from the structure itself before anything's even grown over it, then a gradual living canopy as climbers take hold. Grapevines, climbing roses, wisteria and other suitable climbers each create a different effect, though their eventual weight, vigour and upkeep need thinking about from the start, since a young climber tied to a bare pergola won't do much for a garden during its first hot summer.

That's where temporary shade earns its keep, rather than being dismissed as a poor substitute for planting. A shade sail, a parasol, a gazebo, a removable fabric panel can make a seating area usable and protect vulnerable pots while the permanent planting has time to develop. It also lets us test an idea — before committing to a tree, we can see whether shade in that spot actually improves the garden or just leaves it darker than expected. There's no rule that climate adaptation has to be alive. The living parts will likely provide the better long-term answer, but a well-placed piece of cloth can make an immediate difference to a courtyard or new-build garden with no mature canopy at all — and structures matter especially where there isn't enough ground for a tree. A narrow pergola, an arbour, a climber over wires, a carefully placed screen can cast shade without eating up much planting space. Even the house, walls and fences already throw moving shadows that could be used more intelligently than we currently manage.

The difficulty is that shade on its own doesn't solve drought. Anyone who's gardened beneath an established tree knows this — the canopy cuts the heat, but the tree's roots are also drawing water out of the same soil, and large trees can create some of the driest ground in a garden, especially where shallow roots share space with whatever's planted beneath them. Cool shade and dry shade are not the same thing. The sheltered side of a wall can stay relatively cool without a mass of competing roots underneath it. Soil beneath a mature beech, birch, conifer or big evergreen can get less rainfall, support extensive roots, and end up genuinely parched. Plant a tree to protect one border from heat, and you may eventually end up with a border needing an entirely different range of plants. We're not removing a difficulty so much as choosing which set of conditions we'd rather garden with.

For plenty of gardens, dappled shade offers the best balance — a light canopy softening the strongest sun without producing permanent gloom, rain still finding its way through, underplanting getting periods of direct or filtered light as the branches move. Dense evergreen shade behaves quite differently. It's valuable for shelter and privacy, but it keeps blocking light right through winter and can intercept a serious amount of rainfall, leaving the ground beneath it hard to plant and nearby buildings darker and damper. That doesn't make evergreen trees and shrubs undesirable — it just means being clear about the actual job we need them to do.

There are ways to create shade without adding a single new woody plant, too. Dense planting shades the soil from below — a border full of overlapping foliage loses far less water from its surface than one with isolated plants standing in bare earth. Ground-cover plants, leaf litter and mulch all cut down how much soil sits directly exposed to sun and drying wind. The difference can be startlingly obvious during a drought: closely planted borders often stay looking alive while isolated plants in open soil struggle badly. Long grass shelters the soil beneath it even once the top growth's gone dry. Weeds pushing through paving may look untidy, but their roots and foliage break up what would otherwise be an exposed, heat-absorbing surface. None of that means every garden should be left to run wild — just that bare soil and widely spaced planting may not be quite as desirable as we've always assumed.

The woodland model is useful here, even with no intention of actually creating woodland. Woodland is rarely trees standing over empty ground — there's a canopy, then smaller trees and shrubs, plants at ground level, climbers, a layer of fallen material, and each layer intercepts light, slows water and shelters something beneath it. A domestic garden can borrow that principle without copying the look. A small tree rising above a shrub. Perennials and ferns underneath, with lower plants covering the soil between them. Fallen leaves kept where practical rather than swept from every inch of the border. The planting becomes a community of different heights instead of a set of separate specimens displayed against bare ground — and that kind of layering shelters from wind as well. Heat and drought get talked about together, but a hot, drying wind can damage plants even with plenty of moisture at the roots. Hedges, shrubs and permeable screens slow wind without the turbulence a completely solid barrier creates, and a sheltered plant loses water far less rapidly than one standing alone on an exposed plot.

In other parts of Britain, wind and excessive rainfall may remain the bigger problems. A gardener in western Scotland, Wales or the north-west of England can be dealing with a season quite unlike one in the South East, and creating more shade there could be the opposite of what's actually needed. Climate adaptation can't become another universal gardening rule — "plant for shade" would be no more useful than "plant for drought" if it ignored local conditions. Every garden still has its own soil, aspect, rainfall, exposure and surrounding buildings. Some already hold several mature trees. Others borrow shade from a neighbouring garden or nearby woodland, and in those, keeping a sunny opening might be the more valuable move.

North-facing gardens may deserve a reassessment too. They've usually been written off as compromised because the house throws shade across them, and yet a densely planted north-facing garden can stay cooler, lose moisture more slowly, and offer somewhere genuinely comfortable during extreme heat. The qualities we've treated as disadvantages may turn out to matter more and more. That doesn't make the south-facing garden suddenly undesirable — it just means uninterrupted exposure isn't always the gift we thought it was.

There's a human side to all this too. A garden isn't resilient if its owner can't use it safely. For some people, strong sun is simply uncomfortable. For others — because of age, illness, medication or heat sensitivity — it can make the garden unusable for much of the day. We talk about seating, paths and raised beds making gardening easier, and shade is part of accessibility too. A sheltered route, a seat under a canopy, somewhere cool near the house — these can decide whether somebody's actually able to spend time outside in summer at all. Wildlife needs those refuges as well. Birds, insects, amphibians and small mammals all benefit from somewhere cooler, and from water positioned where it won't evaporate the moment it's put out. A garden with shade, shelter, dense foliage and different levels of planting offers far more choice than one exposed uniformly to the sun all day.

None of this has to happen at once. Creating shade is a long-term adjustment, and gardens rarely respond well to panic — we don't need to plant the fastest-growing tree available just because last summer was hot. Fast growth usually creates the very size problem a small garden can't accommodate in the first place.

We can start by watching. Which part of the garden becomes unbearable first? Where does the soil dry fastest? Which plants scorch even with moist roots? Where do people and animals naturally gather when it's hot? Is there already useful shade we could keep simply by pruning a bit less hard, or letting a hedge grow a little higher? Then we can work out what kind of shade is actually missing — a tree, maybe, but just as easily a large shrub, a pergola, a climber, a sail, or simply more foliage covering the ground. In some gardens, moving a vulnerable plant into existing afternoon shade will do more than redesigning the whole border. In others, a new canopy will gradually change the conditions for everything growing beneath it.

There's a danger in treating climate-resilient gardening purely as a search for indestructible plants — something drought tolerant, heat tolerant, hardy in winter, happy in wet soil, good for wildlife and reliably beautiful, all without asking much of us in return. Design offers a different answer. Instead of asking every plant to survive the harshest version of the site, we build several smaller environments within it — some sunny, some sheltered, some dry, some able to hold moisture. The garden gets more resilient because not everything's exposed to the same pressure at the same time. Shade is one part of that.

We'll likely still treasure sunshine. After a long British winter, I doubt any of us stop feeling pleased when it comes back. We'll probably keep sunny borders, grow plants that need the warmth, sit in the light when the weather allows it. What may change is the assumption that the best garden gets as much sun as possible. The better garden might simply be the one that gives us a choice — somewhere for the roses and somewhere for the ferns, somewhere for spring sunshine and somewhere to escape an August afternoon, a place where plants stand in full light and another where leaves break it up before it reaches the ground.

For a long time we designed gardens to capture the sun.

We may now need to get just as thoughtful about where we let it go.

Happy Gardening.

Marcus

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Marcus Bergin

Thoughts, observations and conversations from a life spent in gardens.