In the world of British horticulture, the writer, educator, broadcaster and gardener Sarah Raven – a key speaker at this weekend’s Festival of Gardens and Nature in Ballintubbert, Co Laois – has long been considered one of its doyennes. Author of 14 books, her latest, A Year of Cut Flowers, was published in March. Her first, The Cutting Garden, was published 30 years ago, not long after Raven and her husband Adam Nicolson first moved from London to their new home, Perch Hill, a run-down farm in the Sussex Weald.
Entranced by the tranquillity of its rural setting, the couple quickly set about transforming the dilapidated Elizabethan house, farm buildings and grounds into what’s now an extravagantly beautiful, experimental cutting garden, kitchen garden and educational space where Raven has stretched her wings as a plantsperson, designer, teacher and businesswoman.
The beginnings of her eponymously named family business, specialising in seeds and plug plants for flower and kitchen gardens, were also sown in 1996. It, too, soon became an outstanding success – until a big bump in the road last year when overexpansion during the pandemic years resulted in the business going into administration before Raven and her husband succeeded in buying it back. Now scaled down in size but still concentrating on its core products, its undeniable influence on the interconnected worlds of gardening, food growing and flower arranging continues.
Much of this is down to Raven’s enduring eye for beauty, impeccable taste, and exuberant yet finely honed use of vibrant colour, all of which attracted the attention of a generation of gardeners grown weary of the pastel prettiness of the 1980s.
“It’s different now, but when I started gardening and teaching at Perch Hill in the mid-1990s, the fashion was for a gentle, romantic style of gardening made popular by designers such as Penny Hobhouse and Rosemary Verey, using classic English garden plants such as delphiniums, lavender and roses. Very rich, vivid colour schemes weren’t the thing,” says Raven. So much so, in fact, that a show garden which Raven designed for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show back in the mid 1990s was marked down by judges for its “vulgar” use of colour.
Not that it changed her gardening style. As is true of most horticultural trailblazers, Raven was more interested in seeking out new, supremely garden-worthy varieties that could be combined in exciting and innovative ways – a skill she continues to polish to this day through regular, rigorous plant trials at Perch Hill as well as frequent visits to some of Europe’s best plant breeders.
“Certain plants can fall out of fashion, with the result that gardeners tend to overlook them,” she says. “An example is alstroemeria, a relatively unfashionable perennial whose traditional colour range isn’t to everyone’s taste. But its flowering period is impressively long and its flowers last forever in a vase, while breeders are also doing such great work in introducing new varieties in more subtle colour combinations. Another is dahlias, which are now very fashionable but certainly weren’t when I started gardening.”
This large, versatile, supremely colourful, long-flowering group of summer-blooming tuberous perennials is a particular love of Raven’s and a genus she’s become well known for, with several outstanding cultivars named after family members or after gardens connected with the family, including Dahlia ‘Molly Raven’, Dahlia ‘Perch Hill’, and Dahlia ‘Sissinghurst’.
Now managed by the National Trust, Sissinghurst in Kent was the brilliant creation of Vita Sackville-West, grandmother of Raven’s husband – and another self-taught British gardener, designer and writer known for her artistry and originality, as well as her ability to establish fashions rather than studiously follow them. Does Raven ever feel the weight of her shadow? “No. Vita was a once-off, a kind of genius with this brilliant eye. I’ve always consciously avoided trading on that connection in any way.”
Sissinghurst is, of course, most famous for its White Garden, which Sackville-West created during the 1940s and 1950s, using flowering and foliage plants restricted to various shades of white, silver and green.
In contrast, the use of brilliant colour – and the myriad complex and intriguing ways in which different hues and shades can be played off each other – has been a lifelong obsession of Raven’s and is the subject of her next book. On the day we speak, she is working on a photoshoot for this with the photographer Jonathan Buckley, a long-time collaborator. He typically visits Perch Hill at fortnightly intervals between March and October, with each photoshoot taking two or three days. Raven estimates that his archive of shots of Perch Hill now numbers something close to 70,000 images, stretching right back to the late 1990s.
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When we talk, they are in the middle of photographing a yellow-and-blue seasonal arrangement of camassias, Dutch irises, and two tulip varieties, lemon-yellow ‘Green Mile’ and primrose-yellow ‘World Friendship’. “It’s a colour combination I’d have avoided in the past on the basis that it was too conventional, so it’s always surprising to see how my tastes change over time.” Even then, she agrees that the bold and brilliant tones of velvet red, flame orange and plum for which she’s become so well known remain her favourites.
Looking back on the creation of her family garden at Perch Hill, is there any advice Raven wishes she could share with her younger self? “Like any young gardener, I was impatient to see results, and of course that’s one of the many great joys of a cut-flower garden where you’re using lots of annuals and biennials. But I wish I’d also planted more perennials and woody species in the garden’s early years.”
This week in the garden
- Resist the urge to plant out summer bedding or any half-hardy or tender young plants until the end of May, as the risk of damage from a late spring frost remains a threat.
- Young seedlings, transplants and any fresh, soft growth on perennials, biennials and annuals are especially vulnerable to slug damage at this time of year, so keep a vigilant eye out and take suitable precautions. A combination of good garden hygiene, garlic-based foliar sprays and nettle tea is generally very effective.
Dates for your diary
Festival of Gardens & Nature 2026, Ballintubbert House & Gardens, Co Laois; today, Saturday, May 2nd, and tomorrow, Sunday, May 3rd. A weekend of talks, workshops, tours and music as well as specialist plant stalls, featuring a huge range of internationally known speakers and collaborators; see festivalofgardensandnature.com and eventbrite.ie.
