How to design your garden using permaculture principles

When people ask me about permaculture, I find my explanations are easier to understand when I also give some real examples of how permaculture principles can translate into day-to-day scenarios. In that spirit, I thought we could look at how using permaculture thinking can help us create garden spaces that actually work for us as well as being resilient in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.

If you’ve been considering a garden overhaul, or if you’re looking at a new garden and wondering where to start, here are some simple ways you can use permaculture principles and practices to help.

1. Observe before committing to any changes

A garden is a living system, so it needs careful observation before any changes are implemented. If you don’t understand its existing patterns (sun and shade, wind, drainage, existing growth, animal movements, etc.), you could end up creating new problems for yourself. Knowing where everything is and how each element interacts will help you make good decisions.

Spend time watching how the garden currently behaves in different conditions. Ideally, spend a year observing the garden to really get to know it before you commit to a new layout and planting scheme. Make notes and sketch maps to record your observations. As well as classic garden elements (plants, sheds, paved areas), observe where water runs during rain, which areas are shaded, where you hear neighbourhood noises, where wildlife crosses your land, etc. It all helps you understand the system you are about to impact.

Connect and observe from a sit spot

There’s a lovely idea from wilderness and nature education called a ‘sit spot’, and it’s a great way to get to know your garden at a more intimate level. Pick a nice place to sit – somewhere accessible, comfortable, and undisturbed. Stay for as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea, and longer if you can. Return every day, or at least a few times a week. As you sit there, simply look around you and pay attention (no scrolling on your phone!).

At first, you might think this is pointless and you’re just looking at the same few metres of somewhere you already know. But over time, I guarantee, you’ll start to see other details in the scene before you. Depending on the time or day and the seasons, you’ll start to see patterns and interactions you were unaware of before.

Keep doing it long enough, and your spot will stop being merely a scenic backdrop and become a real place you actually know. You’ll find that wildlife gets used to you being there too, so over time you should notice more birds, reptiles, and animals. Some people journal or make notes after so they remember what they saw, heard, and felt as they were sitting (with sketches for the more arty amongst us).

2. Don’t fight your garden’s nature

A lot of the ethics and principles of permaculture come from the idea of working with nature instead of against it. That’s because we recognise that imposing a plan that’s not adapted to a site requires far more input (work, energy, materials, maintenance, etc.) and that isn’t very sustainable.

If you align what’s introduced with what a space is already suited to, rather than fighting its natural tendencies, that element is also likely to be more successful. For example, if you have a naturally sandy, sun-baked slope, don’t sow a water-hungry lawn on it; opt instead for drought-tolerant species like lavender, sedum, ornamental grasses, and thyme that thrive in exactly those conditions without extra watering or intervention.

Your deep observation will have already helped you identify such features in your garden. Now when choosing what to do with a difficult area, consider what it seems suited to rather than just what you want.

3. Make your inputs renewable

When you think about the different areas of your garden and what they will need to keep going each year, are these things that it would be easy for you/the garden to produce or generate directly rather than having to buy them in each time? The reason we think about renewable inputs in permaculture is because of cost but also dependency – relying on others to produce (possibly on the other side of the world) an important input that we have designed our system to need. We see this pattern in industrial agriculture, where the farming system itself doesn’t replenish fertility and so the farmer has to purchase synthetic fertiliser every year.

As you develop your garden design, think about what the garden will need (like fertility, mulch, or water) and then look for ways to produce it over time. For example, you could plant comfrey or nettles so that you can make liquid feed rather than buying fertiliser. Or you could plant sunflowers or amaranth to reduce your reliance on chicken feed (they love comfrey too!).

4. Each element should have multiple functions

Every feature in a permaculture design is chosen, where possible, to do more than one job. This matters because a garden full of single-purpose features needs more elements overall, which increases cost, complexity, and maintenance. When considering any addition to the garden, we ask what else it could contribute besides its most obvious purpose. Let’s take the example of a hedge. You might think a hedge in your garden has one job, like privacy. But when we think about the elements of our garden as interconnected parts of a system, we realise that a hedge can perform many functions, such as:

1. It’s a windbreak, sheltering nearby plants and even lowering heating costs if positioned near the house
2. It’s a privacy screen or visual screen (around messier areas like bins, sheds, or compost heaps)
3. It functions like a fence if we want to keep livestock, pets, or children contained
4. It’s a boundary marker for the property
5. It’s a habitat and nesting site for birds and smaller animals
6. It can produce food if we include fruiting species like blackthorn, hawthorn, elder, crab apple, hazel, etc.
7. It can act as a trellis to support climbing plants like clematis, honeysuckle, or sweet peas
8. It supports pollinators, with blossoms feeding bees and other insects
9. It’s a carbon store, as woody growth locks up carbon over time
10. It stabilises the soil, and its root systems reduce erosion on a slope or bank
11. It’s a noise buffer from a road or neighbouring property
12. It creates a microclimate that allows more tender plants to be grown
13. It’s visually attractive – depending on what we plant, it can offer seasonal colour and structure

5. Layer elements in time and space

At school, many of us learnt about rainforest ecosystems and how the plants there have evolved to occupy different vertical positions so they’re not all competing for the same sunlight at the same height. Rainforests are structured as (top to bottom) emergent, canopy, understorey, and forest floor layers, so they capture more total sunlight across a given area than a single layer would.

Many gardens only use the ground as their plane, leaving other space unused. It’s not just the canopies that give you additional layers; you can also grow things vertically (which is great in smaller spaces or where you just want very dense planting). So consider how trees and shrubs could help you add new layers to your garden, how climbing plants could create vertical vegetal space, but also how you could garden downwards into the soil with root veg, tubers, and bulbs.

Layers aren’t just about space; they’re also about time. Your planting doesn’t have to fill every gap from day one. For example, fast-growing shrubs can shelter a young fruit tree for its first few years, then be cut back once the tree is established and doesn’t need the help anymore. Spring bulbs can finish their display just as summer perennials are filling in over the top of them, sharing the same patch of ground at different points in the year. Although a layered planting scheme looks sparse in year one, it will be completely different a few years on because it’s designed for its future self. Space is shared side by side and also one after another.

6. Keep as much water as possible

Water may be number 6 in this list, but I’d argue it’s the single most important element you should consider in your garden. As climate chaos brings more heatwaves, droughts, and water restrictions, protecting the water we have access to becomes ever more important. Our planet may be blue, but freshwater makes up only 3% of all water on Earth! It’s precious and is only going to become more scarce and more expensive.

When thinking about your garden design, observe how water enters, moves through, and leaves your property, then consider whether that movement should be altered. Look for issues that you can solve: for example, water running too fast down a slope causes erosion, but plants or terraces can slow it down, and a ditch could divert the water to a pond; or if an area gets easily waterlogged, you might install a French drain, plant water-loving plants, or turn it into a small wetland/rain garden.

Installing ponds and water butts to use roof water is also a good idea (underground rainwater storage helps you store even larger volumes). Some people divert sink, shower, and bath water to the garden rather than losing it down the drain – although I recommend you read more about greywater use before doing this.

7. There’s no such thing as waste

Since the Industrial Revolution, our economy has been based on a linear model where materials flow in one direction and end as waste (take, make, use, and discard). Most of us realise that this logic isn’t sustainable. A more circular model keeps materials cycling within a system, so the output of one process becomes another’s input, indefinitely. Keeping what others might consider to be waste and finding uses for them in the garden reduces the volume of what we send to landfill and saves us needing to bring in external resources. There are lots of by-products from our homes and gardens that could be redirected instead of being discarded. Here are just a few ideas:

• Garden clippings: you can compost leaves and prunings, chip woody stalks for mulch, and turn branches into a dead hedge.
• Kitchen waste: vegetable peelings, fruit scraps, and food waste are nitrogen-rich materials for composting
• Cardboard and paper, packaging, egg boxes, toilet roll tubes: can be added to compost (shredded) or used as weed-suppressing sheet mulch
• Wood ash: a good addition to compost heaps and, incidentally, can be used to scour pots and pans (but not suitable for aluminium)
• Human or pet hair (from brushes or haircuts): great for the compost heap, where it releases nitrogen
• Woolen jumpers: used as a mulch or moisture-retention layer around plants or to dress a decorative scarecrow
• Natural fibres like cotton, linen, hemp, silk, jute, bamboo, etc.: can be added to the compost heap or used for scrap fabric crafts to decorate the garden
• Greywater: as mentioned in the point above, it can be used to water plants (with some precautions)
• Urine: can be added to the compost or diluted 1:10 with water to make a nitrogen-rich fertiliser

8. Diversity means resilience

A farm that plants only one crop has just one point of failure. If a single pest, disease, or bad season hits that species, there’s nothing to fall back on, and the harvest is lost. It’s the same thing in a garden. When you have diversity – different species, different families, different tolerances – threats are more contained. What knocks out one plant might leave its neighbour completely unaffected.

Permaculture treats diversity not just as pest/disease insurance but as a way to increase the number of beneficial relationships and functions happening within the same space. More species means more potential pairings (a nitrogen-fixer feeding a heavy feeder, a deep-rooted plant bringing up nutrients that a shallow-rooted one can use, or a flowering plant drawing in predators that protect its neighbours). So we get resilience against threats and increase the number of useful interactions within the system, making the whole system more productive and resilient.

9. Edges are the most valuable areas

There’s an established ecological concept called the ‘edge effect’, and it is applied in permaculture as the design principle of valuing the edge. Have you already noticed how the boundary between two ecosystems (like forest and meadow or land and water) tends to have higher biodiversity and productivity than either area alone? That’s because species from both systems overlap there, plus you get edge-specific species that exist only in that transition space.

If we deliberately increase the amount of edge in a system (such as having wavy pond edges instead of circular ones or using keyhole beds instead of straight rows), we can maximise that naturally more active and productive zone. Edges can be the best parts of a garden; pay particular attention to your boundary areas and consider whether they’re being underused.

10. Put things where you’ll actually use them

When observing your garden and drawing plans of where everything is (or will be), it’s helpful to break your garden down into areas according to how often you interact with them. In permaculture, these are called zones. Zones are useful because they help us site elements according to how often they require attention or interaction, with frequently used things closest and low-maintenance things further away:

• Zone 1 represents the parts of the garden you’re in every day (usually the closest to your house) and where you site the elements that require most attention.
• Zone 2 is the area where you have mostly perennial plants that need less attention.
• Zone 3 is usually the ‘crop’ area, which in a smaller garden could be where you have fruit trees.
• Zone 4 is your semi-wild area, which might include woodland.
• Zone 5 represents areas left to nature (usually only observed rather than visited); this might not be on your property but the area adjacent to it.

Using the idea of zones to plan our elements reduces unnecessary effort but also makes it more likely we will benefit from and maintain them. For example, if your herbs are planted at the bottom of your garden, you’re less inclined to pop out and pick some for dinner. Hiding a compost bin behind a garden shed might be tidier, but if you have to cross a muddy patch of lawn to get there, you might end up putting your kitchen scraps in the bin instead. Zones aren’t about aesthetics but about logistics; they help you plan a realistic layout that works with your actual habits.

Start with smaller or less permanent ideas

I hope the above has inspired you to rethink how you interact with your garden. If changing everything feels overwhelming, that’s perfectly normal. Start with small solutions that are easy to implement (like a compost bin, a pollinator bed, or a water butt). After a while, those little steps will add up, and your garden will start to look completely different. And if you’re just exploring and experimenting, avoid making changes that will be hard to reverse. For example, if you’re not sure a pond is for you, make a water-tank pond instead and live with that for a couple of years before committing to the disruption and expense of digging up your garden.