This Manor house garden is one that I took on the maintenance of a couple of seasons ago. It suited me at the time as I was able to work on my own initiative & alone. It is about as different as you can get from how I garden at home & it would be hard to make a case for it being sustainable, yet even here, Permaculture can find its place. These big gardens are very labour intensive; that was the whole point of them in the first place. If you could afford to employ all those people to look after an extensive garden, you must indeed be very wealthy. These days motor mowers & other such equipment make it a lot easier to be managed by fewer people. One of my conditions for taking on the job was that I didn't do the lawns!

 It still however consumes a lot of energy to maintain, not least in the cost of fuel & gardening hours. Large areas of lawns & gravel driveways take a lot of looking after. We all know how quickly grass can grow in the summer months & unlike a meadow that can be grazed, large gardens with extensive beds of shrubs & plants where the grass has to look carpet-like, can only be mown. Lawns are both incredibly energy-intensive & heavily reliant upon chemical sprays to keep them looking 'perfect'. In the USA it has been discovered that Americans collectively spend more money & use more pesticides & herbicides on their lawns, than on agriculture to grow their food! I can only assume that we are heading in the same direction....

 Gravel driveways are just as difficult to maintain. Weed seeds in particular love the warm moist conditions provided there & come up in great numbers when the weather warms up in the Spring. Such gardens usually use sprays regularly to kill these weeds, I chose to weed by hand, hoeing where the gravel was deep enough but the only long term sustainable solution would be to replace the gravel! Permaculture shows us that we need to work with nature; pulling out pioneer plants who were trying to colonise a gravel 'desert' was doing just the opposite & didn't sit well with my way of gardening. The reason I eventually gave up the job & looked for something else that was more in line with my own philosophies.

 A garden this size demonstrates the great value of trees, shrubs, bulbs & perennials. With a little care, displays like this one will appear year after year & this is why Permaculture gardens are mostly based around these types of plants. Vigorous self-seeders are also plants that you can more or less leave to get on with it. In this particular garden, Honesty & Nasturtium were prime examples of such plants. Of course, Permaculture gives a lot of attention to the value of any plant in the garden & a lot of the time that means asking what physical resource do we get from it? This was very much once my mindset, but these days I also value the scents & colours that other plants give us as nourishment too & I seek to find a balance of all these things in my own garden.

 Another major energy input, that isn't so easy to deal with by modern methods is the issue of weeding such extensive beds of plants, shrubs & trees. When I arrived I discovered that one Permaculture technique was already in use: that of mulching. Considerable amounts of mulch material were being laid down around the plants in the winter months & this suppressed the growth of weeds during the rest of the year, greatly reducing the workload in the growing season. A great many things can be used to fulfil this task, though all have their advantages & disadvantages. Manure, spent mushroom compost, straw, bark chippings, leafmould, grass clippings & plastic sheeting are all things that can be put to use as mulch.

 Examining various criteria such as cost (& availability), biodegradability, ease of application & look, can lead to different materials being chosen depending on the garden in question. In a garden such as this, looks are considered important & with the large area of beds that needed to be covered, something locally available & cheap was most appropriate. The two seasons I was there I used locally bought spent mushroom compost & although it was a lot of work to get it spread over all the beds, it was work that was done at the quietest time of year. Without the mulch, the weeding in the garden would be considerably more difficult & overall, energy was certainly saved.

 Permaculture recognises seven distinct vertical layers that are occupied by plants. These are the canopy trees, sub-canopy trees, shrubs, herbs, climbers, ground cover plants & roots. A garden of this size contains plants within all these groups & so in some ways, it is a more complete eco-system than many smaller gardens. More diversity of plant life leads to more wildlife & that can only be a good thing nowadays. Gardening on such a scale also enables many different combinations of plants to be grown together & here we meet another Permaculture principle. In the wild, plants grow in 'guilds' which are grouping of plants which are mutually beneficial to each other. This could be as simple as a tree providing support for a climber, which in turn gives off a substance that repels pests from the tree. Many guilds are far more complex than this, but we can learn from observation which groupings of plants work well & use them for our own benefit. There are many tried & tested guilds regularly used in Permaculture gardens to reduce insect damage without resorting to chemicals & they often involve aromatic herbs whose strong scents do the job far more safely.

 One resource that wasn't being harvested at all when I arrived was the rain & while it would take a lot of water storage to collect enough for the whole garden, there were plenty of roofs & guttering to plumb water butts onto. Tap water with its added chemicals may be just about OK for watering established plants, but seedlings are much more delicate & prefer rain water. Water butts are obviously best placed where the water will be needed, in this case by the greenhouse, but frustratingly these greenhouses were not designed for this. One of them could have no guttering at all because of the shape it was & the other provided no way of efficiently getting the water from the built in mini gutter into a downpipe for collection.

 Fortunately, most greenhouses I have come across have been better designed than this. While there may be some very labour intensive lawns & driveways in such formal gardens, there are also areas which are much more natural. Permaculture has its part to play even here, saving maintenance work & creating areas that yield much more than just a view. That said, gardening on this scale can provide some very beautiful sights (& scents!) hard to achieve in much smaller spaces; the photo of the Wisteria (below left) being just one fine example of this.