Where the sun lands in a garden, hour by hour, on any day of the year.
Put in a postcode, draw what stands there, and move the clock. Scroll down and this garden runs through 21 May in Edinburgh, from before sunrise to after sunset.
The right-hand half: for sale
See where the sun lands before you make an offer.
Put in the postcode of the house you're looking at. Sunpatch draws the buildings round it from OpenStreetMap; you mark out the garden. It counts the hours of direct sun on each part of it for any day of the year, with next door's extension and trees in the way.
"South-facing" in a listing gives you the direction. It doesn't tell you what the neighbours do to it.
The left-hand half: lived in
Once it's yours, put the beds where the light is.
Draw in what's there and what you'd like: beds, a tree, a greenhouse, a bench. Each spot gets its hours of sun, split into morning and afternoon, and a list of plants that suit it, with the numbers behind each suggestion.
Any day of the year
A garden in May isn't the garden in December.
On 21 May the sun over Edinburgh gets to 54° at 13:10. On 21 December it gets to 11°, and a two-metre fence throws a shadow over ten metres long at midday. Sunpatch runs any date you give it.
Evenings
Somewhere for a bench.
In late May the sun sets in the north-west, at 21:29 in Edinburgh. In a garden that faces south, the evening light comes in over a side fence, not the back one, so the sunniest spot at nine o'clock may not be the sunniest at noon.