CHARM IN ABUNDANCE
Designer Jeremy Allen’s own garden reflects his clever use of structure and mass planting
This is Constable Country,’ Jeremy Allen says of the landscape surrounding his home on the Suffolk/essex borders. The Old Vicarage Wormingford nestles in a picture-perfect ‘classic verdant dell’. Jeremy has imprinted a series of breathtaking gardens at its heart, fringed by magnificent indigenous trees. Each ‘room’ has a firm and definite handwriting, yet, there is clear and unifying connectivity. Jeremy’s designs follow the premise that ‘simplicity and use of big, bold design with good structure and repetition are key’.
Jeremy honed these skills during an intensive year, 2008, at Inchbald School of Design. ‘I’ve never worked so hard – I really loved it,’ he says. His enthusiasm positively confirms the decision to ‘cease with the city’, and carve out a career in garden design. The 12-acre plot encircling the vicarage he and his family moved to, was no blank canvas. ‘I cannot exaggerate the overgrown and neglected state of the grounds – nature had truly taken over,’ says Jeremy, who removed over 200 elders and sycamores leaving a framework of ‘splendid native trees, meadows and a three- to four-acre space. These big spaces called for definite layout, strong structure and abundant planting,’ which Jeremy creatively delivers in spades.
His interpretation of a ‘classic English summer border’ embraces a tumultuous mix of architectural grasses with herbaceous perennials. This fusion of antiqued-colours and touch-me texture is achieved by abundant, mass planting of repeated key perennials, such as geraniums, salvias, echinacea, veronicastrum, knautia, Verbena bonariensis, phlox and sedum, which unite to create an immense ‘wall’ of flowers.
Irregular repetition reinforces structure and cohesion while simultaneously creating movement and flow. This thrilling Piet Oudolf-inspired garden centrepiece enjoys full sun and rolls on through summer and into autumn. Decorative seed heads and grasses linger on to provide winter interest.
On a steepish incline, east of the house, a fifty/fifty mix of grasses and new perennials swarm more freely, reminiscent of a prairie meadow. Based on a paisley textile design, seven curvaceous islands, afloat with grasses and flowers, seem as one. Jeremy combines a range of grasses, tall Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, Stipa gigantea and shorter Hakonechloa macra, with an array of richly coloured, summer-flowering perennials, including echinacea, salvia, perovskia, gaura, actaea and persicaria.
Jeremy’s bold designs can also be ingeniously simple. ‘The difficulty in design is sometimes learning what to leave out,’ he says. The rill garden, secreted beyond the main lawn, exemplifies the power of restraint and the impact of repetition. Definitive, geometric hard-landscaping is echoed in the structural planting; clipped, shaven and sharpened yew hedging, box tablets and sculpted spheres of Pyrus salicifolia. ‘Piet said, “Worry about structure first, colour is secondary”,’ says Jeremy.
This green architecture is simply embellished with a handful of foliage-interest plants, which underpin a foam of white summer flowers. The mirror-image beds reflect in the still waters of the central canal, simply reinforcing this well thought-out design.
The component parts of the garden are exciting and diverse, but are unified by the creator’s absolute hallmark and design method. ‘You need strong, definite structure and layout and to plant abundantly against that to produce a really good result.’
“BOLD STRUCTURE IS ENHANCED BY MORE DELICATE, WILDER AREAS. CREATIVITY IS ESSENTIAL TO BALANCE THE AESTHETICS OF BOTH”
JEREMY ALLEN,
garden designer