The evolution of Sarah Raven's gardens in East Sussex
As every British gardener knows, Sarah Raven’s name goes hand in hand with all that is beautiful and exciting about gardening. Having inspired and educated a whole generation of garden makers through her books, articles and courses, her influence is phenomenal. As her own likes and dislikes change, so do the public’s. If she raves about a certain tulip, sales of that variety will go through the roof. And gardeners absolutely know that they can trust her judgement, because she has grown and trialled everything she sells – from her legendary container combinations to the vases she chooses for her cut flowers.
The hub of her horticultural empire is the house she shares with her writer husband Adam Nicolson, Perch Hill in Sussex, which they bought 30 years ago. Undeterred by the fact it was known to locals as the poorest farm in the parish because of its windswept slopes and depleted soil, they fell instantly in love with the place and threw themselves wholeheartedly into country life. They renovated the farmhouse and replaced the roof on the oast house, and Sarah began to map out the now well-known garden that bursts with colour from the first tulips to the last dahlias. They were immediately ‘deeply embedded’ at Perch Hill, as Adam puts it, and it was difficult to tear themselves away when, in 2004, after the death of Adam’s father, they moved to his family home at Sissinghurst with their two daughters.
They lived there for eight years, but found themselves at odds with the way it was being run by the National Trust (as documented in a BBC Four series Hidden Treasures of the National Trust) and eventually made the decision to return to the home comforts and relative simplicity of the farm. The farmhouse and outbuildings have a Bloomsbury feel, with a palette of rich, chalky colours linking the inside with the outside. ‘The interiors have always been a collaborative thing, but perhaps more Adam than me,’ says Sarah.
Life before Perch Hill was very different. Sarah had been working as a junior doctor at Charing Cross Hospital in London when she became pregnant with their first daughter. Rosie was nine months old when they bought Perch Hill and Sarah went back to work part-time – but the juggle became increasingly hard. The birth of Molly, their second daughter, was the catalyst to take a step back from her medical career as she threw herself into making a new garden, something that felt completely instinctive to her.
Immersed in nature from an early age, she spent much of her childhood plant hunting with her father John Raven, to whom she was very close. He had taken up botany in his mid fifties to compile a geographical catalogue of wild plants in Britain. ‘We’d go off in his Mini Clubman in search of specimens,’ recalls Sarah. ‘He’d look at a map and know the geology meant certain plants would be growing there, so he’d send me into the woods or up a hill to find something.’ Following in the footsteps of his own father, John was a talented watercolourist; between them, they painted every plant in the British flora. Sarah was only 17 when her father died, but he left her 18 volumes of these amazing paintings: ‘Plants were completely in my blood and, though I didn’t know it at the time, my path was already set.’
Sarah’s initial step at Perch Hill was to create a cutting garden, which soon became the subject of her first book. At the time, in the 1990s, almost no one was growing annual cut flowers, but she forged ahead with no inkling of the surge in interest she was about to unleash.
Before leaving London, she had started a flower business called Garlic and Sapphire with university friend Lou Farman (the now retired co-founder of Sarah Raven). Sarah had noticed that all the London florists were using annuals like ammi and cosmos, so she tracked down seeds and started to grow them herself, experimenting in her own garden to find the best cut-and-come-again varieties. These trials became the basis for both the teaching on her new courses and the seeds that she subsequently sold from her kitchen table. ‘I planted up one-metre-square trial beds and would record how many stems I could pick over a number of weeks. I created a scoring system – anything that got eight or above went in the catalogue.’ Her first seed catalogue included some of her most enduringly popular flowers, like Cosmos bipinnatus ‘Purity’ and ‘Dazzler’, blue Salvia viridis and Calendula officinalis ‘Indian Prince’.
Before long, the seed catalogue expanded to include tulip bulbs and dahlia tubers. ‘The first dahlia collection was advertised on a little fold-out flyer with 12 varieties,’ Sarah says. ‘One day, the postman came down the drive with a wad of orders. It was a complete disaster – we couldn’t supply them all. Adam and I had to spend two days ringing up people to let them know we’d have to tear up their cheques. In those early days, we did all the fulfilment ourselves. The girls’ school friends would help in the holidays.’
From these humble beginnings, the Sarah Raven brand has blossomed. It is now a multi-million-pound business with its own Lincolnshire nursery and in-house fulfilment company. ‘It’s not always been easy,’ says Sarah. ‘As you get bigger, you are pushed in directions you don’t necessarily want to take. Over the years, I’ve asked people to help with the buying, but it’s so hard for someone else to understand my way of looking at things. I mostly do product selection myself – I can’t sell things I wouldn’t have in my own life.’
A self-confessed workaholic, she finds it hard to switch off. She is always up at 5.30am, giving herself a couple of quiet hours in the garden before her team arrives or, in winter, a period of writing before other things take over. ‘I live and breathe this – it’s my life,’ she says. ‘I have to get away from Perch Hill to relax.’ This might mean escaping to the family’s cottage in Scotland, where they try to spend August each year, or to Crete, where they are building a house. But in her working life there is no sign of any slowing down. She has recently launched a peat-free compost and wants to devote more time to dahlia breeding; there are also plans for a new teaching centre, shop and café in a different part of the country from her Sussex home.
Whatever direction Sarah takes her business in, she will carry on running courses. ‘I want to be teaching, however old I am,’ she says. Just as she learned from her father, she is happiest passing on her knowledge – inspiring people to set off on their own gardening adventures.
A Year Full of Pots: Container Flowers for All Seasons by Sarah Raven is out 14th March 2024 (Bloomsbury Publishing, Hardback, £27)
Sarah Raven: sarahraven.com