Evergreen or deciduous: choosing for shade in summer and sun in winter - Plant Drop

Evergreen or deciduous: choosing for shade in summer and sun in winter

Most planting plans around a house are really two separate jobs that want opposite things from a plant. Shading a wall through summer wants a canopy that gets out of the way in winter. Screening a boundary wants foliage that never goes anywhere. Choose the wrong foliage type for the job and you either cook the living room in January or find yourself looking straight at the neighbours' driveway every June.

Every product page now carries a spec table stating foliage type, so you can settle this before you order rather than after the truck arrives.

Why deciduous belongs on the north

In Australia the sun sits in the northern half of the sky. In summer it is high overhead at midday; in winter it tracks low across the north. That difference is the whole argument for deciduous planting.

A deciduous tree set off the north wall of a house does two useful things a year apart. In summer the canopy is full and it intercepts the high midday sun before it reaches the wall and the glass. In winter the same tree is bare, the low northern sun passes through the branches and warms the brick, the slab and the room behind the window. You get shade when you want it and light when you need it, from one plant, with no maintenance decision required.

Two practical points people get wrong here.

  • Distance matters more than height. Shade comes from canopy spread sitting between the high sun and the wall, so a tree planted hard against the house shades almost nothing useful and gets pruned into a stick within five years. Give it room for the mature spread stated on the product page, and accept that the shadow at midday falls close to the trunk.
  • A bare canopy is not clear glass. Trunk, branches and twigs still intercept a meaningful share of winter light, and a densely twiggy species intercepts more than an open one. That is an argument for one well placed tree rather than a row of them across the whole northern face.

Good candidates for this job from what we stock are the maples, particularly where you want a compact canopy near a courtyard, the crepe myrtles for a smaller footprint with a long flowering run, the ornamental pears for an upright form in a narrow side setback, and silver birch in cooler gardens where it is genuinely happy. Deciduous magnolias such as the saucer types work well as a north-side feature where the winter flowering happens on bare wood, exactly when you want the light through.

The west is a different problem

Western sun in summer is low, late in the day and carries the heaviest heat load of the whole day. Because it arrives at a shallow angle it goes under a raised canopy rather than through it, so a single shade tree on the west often underperforms. The fix is usually a taller, denser mass of planting closer to the wall, and here evergreen is defensible: the winter sun you give up on the west is worth much less than the summer heat you block. Dense lilly pilly, paperbark or olive planted as a group on a western boundary earns its keep.

On the south side, direct sun is minimal all year, so foliage type is a design choice rather than a thermal one. The one thing worth remembering is your southern neighbour: a tall evergreen on your south boundary shades their northern face in winter.

Why boundaries want evergreen

Privacy does not take a season off. A deciduous hedge screens well from October to April and then goes transparent for the months when you have lights on inside at 5pm and the low sun is coming in sideways. If the job is privacy screening or a formal hedge, evergreen is the only sensible answer.

This is the most common ordering mistake we see. Crepe myrtle in particular gets bought for boundary screening because it is fast, tough and flowers hard. It is a fine street tree and a fine feature tree. It is a poor privacy screen, because for a third of the year it is bare stems.

Typical trade spacings for evergreen screen lines, planted as a single row:

Plant Tight hedge Looser screen
Lilly pilly (larger cultivars) 1m 1.5m to 2m
Lilly pilly (compact cultivars) 60cm to 80cm 1m
Camellia sasanqua 1m 1.5m
Westringia 60cm 80cm to 1m
Indian hawthorn 60cm 80cm to 1m
Evergreen magnolia (compact forms) 1.5m 2m to 2.5m
Bottlebrush as a screen 1.5m 2m

Tighter spacing closes over sooner and costs more plants. Do not go tighter than the left column: a hedge fighting itself thins out at the base, which is the part you needed.

Which of our lines are which

Foliage type is stated per product, and it is worth checking rather than assuming by genus, because several genera contain both. The broad picture:

Collection Foliage Worth knowing
Gum trees Evergreen Sheds leaves, bark and twigs year round rather than in one autumn drop
Lilly pilly Evergreen The default screening genus in most of our delivery states
Camellias Evergreen Sasanqua types take sun and hedging; japonica types want shelter
Citrus Evergreen Unlike most other fruit trees, which are deciduous
Magnolias Both Grandiflora types are evergreen and screen well; saucer and star types are deciduous
Figs and ficus Both Ornamental ficus are evergreen; the edible fig is deciduous
Oaks Mostly deciduous Holm oak types hold their leaves, so read the spec line
Elms Mostly deciduous Chinese elm can hold foliage well into winter in warm districts
Maples and Japanese maples Deciduous Want protection from hot afternoon wind, so east side rather than west
Crepe myrtle Deciduous Feature and street tree, not a privacy screen
Wattle, bottlebrush, grevillea, westringia, emu bush Evergreen The native screening and understorey backbone
Lomandra and grasses, mat rush, flax lily, NZ flax, cordyline Evergreen Mass planting that stays furnished under deciduous canopies in winter
Kurrajong Evergreen Can shed heavily under drought stress, so treat it as evergreen with caveats

Leaf litter and gutters, honestly

The idea that deciduous trees are messy and evergreens are clean does not survive contact with a roof. Evergreens do not stop dropping leaves, they drop a small volume constantly, all year, including into gutters you clean in autumn and forget about. Deciduous trees drop a large volume over a few weeks and then stop, which is a bigger single job and a much smaller annual one.

What actually matters:

  • Do not plant a large gum over the roofline. Eucalypts shed leaves, bark strips and small branches continuously, and bark in particular blocks gutters and downpipes in a way leaves do not. Site gum trees away from the house and enjoy them from a distance.
  • Fruiting screens near paving are a staining decision. Lilly pilly fruit, olives and figs all drop something that marks pavers and gets walked inside. Keep them off the main path, or choose a low fruiting cultivar and check the spec table.
  • Pools favour the deciduous side of the ledger. A deciduous tree gives you two or three weeks of scooping; a fine-leaved evergreen gives you a skimmer basket to empty every week of the year.
  • Gutter guard changes the maths more than plant choice does. If a tree suits the position, guard the gutters rather than downgrade the tree.

Putting it together

For a typical suburban block, a defensible plan looks like this. One deciduous feature tree off the north face of the main living area, sized so its mature spread covers the glass and set far enough out that the canopy, not the trunk, does the work. Evergreen mass on the west boundary to take the afternoon load. An evergreen screen line down the side boundaries where privacy is year round. Evergreen strappy planting underneath everything so the garden still reads as furnished in July when the canopy above is bare.

If the shade job is urgent, buy the size that does it. A 45L tree takes years to shade a window, which is why the semi advanced, advanced and 100L and larger stock exists: on a real job, shade in two summers rather than eight is worth more than the difference in price. Check foliage type in the spec table before you commit the row, and the rest of the plan follows.

Plants featured in this guide

Everything below is currently available farm-direct, with flat $99 delivery in QLD, NSW, VIC, SA, ACT and WA and a $399 minimum order.

Browse the full range: Magnolias · Maples · Ornamental and Fruiting Pears · Lilly Pilly

Related ranges: Conifers and cypress, Flowering cherries and blossom trees, Ash trees, Liquidambar, Cercis and Forest Pansy.

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