How can I obtain an 'unbalanced' grid of ggplots?

Question

With grid.arrange I can arrange multiple ggplot figures in a grid to achieve a multi-panel figure by using something like:

library(ggplot2) library(grid) library(gridExtra) 

generate some ggplot2 plots , then

plot5 <- grid.arrange(plot4, plot1, heights=c(3/4, 1/4), ncol=1, nrow=2) 

How can I obtain an 'unbalanced' 2 col layout with one plot in the entire first col and three plots in the second col? I toyed with a 'grid-of-grids' approach by trying to use grid.arrange to plot one grid (e.g. plot5, above) against another plot, but obtained:

Error in arrangeGrob(..., as.table = as.table, clip = clip, main = main, : input must be grobs!

Update:

Thanks for the advice. I will look into viewports and grid. In the meantime, thanks to @DWin, the layOut function in the 'wq' package worked very well for the compilation figure in my Sweave document:

Update 2:

The arrangeGrobcommand (as suggested by @baptiste) also works well, and seems very intuitive - at least it was easy to alter widths of the two columns. It also has the benefit of not requiring the `wq' package.

e.g. Here is the code from my Sweave file:

<<label=fig5plot, echo=F, results=hide>>= plot5<-grid.arrange(plot4, arrangeGrob(plot1, plot2, plot3, ncol=1),                      ncol=2, widths=c(1,1.2)) @ \begin{figure}[]     \begin{center} <<label=fig5,fig=TRUE,echo=T, width=10,height=12>>= <<fig5plot>> @ \end{center} \caption{Combined plots using the `arrangeGrob' command.} \label{fig:five} \end{figure} 

which produces the following output:

BTW, Anyone tell me why the '>NA' appears?

Answer 1

grid.arrange draws directly on the device; if you want to combine it with other grid objects you need arrangeGrob, as in

 p = rectGrob()  grid.arrange(p, arrangeGrob(p,p,p, heights=c(3/4, 1/4, 1/4), ncol=1),               ncol=2) 

Edit (07/2015): with v>2.0.0 you can use the layout_matrix argument,

 grid.arrange(p,p,p,p, layout_matrix = cbind(c(1,1,1), c(2,3,4)))