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.