Sarah Raven, whose eponymous brand is based on colourful cut flowers, shares her love of all things bright and beautiful in her gloriously vibrant gardens at Perch Hill in East Sussex
WORDS JACKY HOBBS PHOTOGRAPHS JONATHAN BUCKLEY
Autumn at Perch Hill is truly dazzling. Masses of richly coloured florals are still blazing away. Dahlias dominate, outweighing but not outshining the masses of perennials that light up the entire garden. Pulsating with pollinators, swollen with ripening fruits and berries to attract birds and other wildlife, the whole garden is vibrant and alive from the tops of its trees to its tuberous toes.
Sarah Raven has famously created this garden, shaping it over the past three decades to turn it into the much coveted flower-filled idyll we all dream of recreating. As a brand, ‘Sarah Raven’ provides an educational, informative and also commercial platform to help us achieve greatness in our own gardens. “There was never a grand business or garden plan. Things have grown organically,” explains Sarah, “but the unique selling point of the brand is that I live and breathe the garden. It’s real and genuine. While I haven’t grown every single shrub and tree myself, I know every single plant in the range intimately.”
Sarah is relentlessly inquisitive and scientific in her thirst for detailed plant knowledge and understanding, her transferable skills honed from medical training as a doctor. When Sarah and her husband, writer Adam Nicolson, arrived at Perch Hill Farm in 1994, with their baby daughter Rosie, Sarah was working three-week shifts at the Royal Sussex Hospital. The farmhouse was basic and there was a goldfish pond, apple tree and lawn but no real garden – impossible to imagine now. Sarah began by carving out 1m2 plant patches to grow flowers for cutting: cosmos, phlox and peonies – flowers she knew from her parent’s garden. “The cosmos were very productive compared to the peonies, so I quickly switched tack and grew masses of different annuals,” Sarah recalls. Her frequent visits to buy flowers at the old Covent Garden Market revealed many new must-have blooms, which she enthusiastically added to her ever-increasing portfolio of home-grown flowers for cutting.
Soon after, Monty Don, who is a friend of Adam’s, “came to Perch Hill to write an article about my annuals for The Observer. On arrival he decided I should write it first-hand, but he stayed long enough to show me how seed should be sown!” Sarah remembers. “I was now a ‘writer’ and following
