CHARM IN ABUNDANCE

Designer Jeremy Allen’s majestic garden reflects his passion for bold structure reinforced by select mass and repeat plantings

- JACKY HOBBS

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.