Gardening in a changing climate
Gardens facing the challenge
National Trust
Audit in progress
An energy audit has shown that lighting and heating the National Trust’s buildings uses far more energy than maintaining its gardens.
The Trust’s Head of Gardens, Mike Calnan is working with a small team of head gardeners - led by Ed Ikin at Nymans - who are developing ways to minimise environmental impacts. ‘The ideas that work will be spread to other Trust gardens,’ says Mike. Key areas they are looking at, include mowing regimes and self-sufficiency in water.
For example, at Acorn Bank, Cumbria, tight-clipped lawns have been replaced by wildflower meadows; at Osterley Park in West London, cattle now graze close to the house on areas that until recently were mown. ‘Much of what we are doing to reduce our footprint is not new: it is going back to traditional methods,’ Mike points out.
That is particularly true in water management, as traditional water-harvesting technology is being restored. At Powis Castle, huge lead tanks are being reconnected to the roof guttering to supply water to the glasshouses. ‘At Knightshayes, new fibreglass tanks, holding more than 450,000 litres of water, were sunk into the ground during the walled garden restoration,’ he adds.
He acknowledges that maintaining the Trust’s gardens remains energy dependent - 900,000 litres (198,000 gallons) of fuel a year is used on mowing alone, despite big reductions in frequency. ‘We have a duty to conserve gardens in their original state as far as possible, so we can’t, for example, turn Cliveden’s lawns into meadow. But we can and do use biofuel, or rechargeable electric mowers, wherever we can.’
Perhaps the most exciting Trust project is at Wallington, in Northumberland, which is the first entire Trust property - house, garden, parkland and farms - to attempt to become carbon-neutral.