Understanding the Role of Light in the Garden
how light affects your garden, how it changes throughout the year and tips for gardening with light in mind
Happy Winter Solstice! I can’t think of a better day to talk about light than the day with the least amount of it.
We’re all familiar with the idea of light changing throughout the day and the year. Daily, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Throughout the year we experience our hours of daylight dwindling per day or increasing per day. We associate seasonal shifts in weather and temperature with these changes in light.
While the above breaks down the basics pretty succinctly, there are some more subtle changes that we can consider as gardeners and apply to our overall gardening strategy. Where we garden and the placement of each plant is certainly something to consider, and something I think most gardeners have a basic understanding of. Something more often overlooked when it comes to planning a garden and light is the length of daylight and how that impacts our gardens.
We need to understand light before we can use it to plan our gardens. To do so, let’s break it down - the orbit of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the axis upon which the earth rotates. These two things work together to create differences in the position of the earth about the sun throughout the year and different lengths of daylight throughout the year. Or in other words, the seasons we experience.