Shade first: planning a back yard for a Folsom summer

Most unsuccessful back yards in this city are unsuccessful for one reason. They were designed as a plan view, laid out on paper as shapes that fit the lot, and the sun was never part of the drawing. Then July arrives, the west-facing terrace hits the low nineties by four in the afternoon and stays there past dinner, and the household ends up using the yard for about six weeks a year.

Designing shade first inverts that. Work out where the space will be comfortable in August, put the patio there, and let the rest of the plan arrange itself around it.

Two kinds of shade, on two different timescales

Built shade, available immediately

• Freestanding pergola, $8,000 to $20,000. Cuts glare, softens light, does little for radiant heat on its own. Add a fabric canopy or a louvre system and it earns its place.
• Attached solid-roof cover, $20,000 to $45,000. The one that holds up in a Folsom August. Permitted work, usually with electrical, and it changes the light inside the adjacent room too.
• Shade sails on engineered posts, $3,000 to $9,000. Cheaper, effective, and they need proper footings. Sails fixed to a fence post pull it over within a season.
• Retractable awnings, $2,500 to $8,000. Flexible, and they need retracting before wind, which in practice means they get left out and damaged.

Grown shade, available in five to fifteen years

A canopy tree placed to intercept late afternoon sun on the west and southwest walls does more for both the yard and the cooling bill than any structure, and costs a fraction as much. Chinese pistache, red maple, and London plane reach useful size in five to seven years here. Valley oak and interior live oak are the long game. Placement matters more than species: a well-positioned tree southwest of the house outperforms a bigger one in the wrong corner.

Reading the sun on your own lot

Spend one hot afternoon on it before drawing anything. At two, four, and six in the afternoon during a July week, photograph the yard from the back door and mark where the shadows fall. Those three photographs are worth more than any amount of theory, because fences, neighbouring houses, and existing trees shape the picture in ways a compass bearing will not tell you.

Surfaces, and how hot they get

• Light-coloured concrete or pavers. Coolest underfoot and brightest in glare terms. A light surface under a solid roof is the comfortable combination.
• Dark pavers and dark stone. Handsome, and they store heat all afternoon and release it into the evening.
• Decomposed granite. Cool, permeable, cheap, and it tracks into the house on shoes.
• Synthetic turf. No irrigation, high surface temperature in direct sun. Good in shade or a dog run, poor as the main plane of a west-facing yard.
• Living lawn. The coolest surface in the yard by some margin, and the most expensive to run. Where a family uses it, a small well-placed lawn earns its water; where nobody walks on it, it does not.

Screening and enclosure

A back yard that feels exposed does not get used either, particularly on the newer subdivision lots where houses sit close and windows look across. Screening planting along a fence line does the job better than raising the fence, and evergreen species that hold their leaves through a dry summer do it year round. Pacific wax myrtle, toyon, and clumping bamboo in a root barrier are the usual answers. Plant at mature spacing rather than at instant-effect spacing, and accept two seasons of gaps.

Lighting, and why it doubles the season

In a climate where the comfortable hours in summer are after sunset, lighting is not decoration, it is what makes the yard usable at the time of day people want to be in it. A workable scheme uses three separate circuits: path lights at low level for movement, uplights on two or three trees for depth, and something warm and dim at the seating area. At $180 to $380 per fixture installed, a good scheme is ten to twenty fixtures rather than forty.

Aim the fixtures after dark, on site, with someone standing at the seating position. Lights aimed in daylight are almost always pointed wrong, and the difference between a scheme that looks considered and one that looks like an airport runway is entirely in that hour.