Sarah Raven: ‘I find nature very inspiring and reassuring, when things are feeling a bit dire in the world and we have world wars’
The gardener and writer on her love of Cretan wild flowers, why she quit her job as a doctor, her husband’s grandmother Vita Sackville-West — and her consuming passions.
Sarah Raven, the gardener, writer and cook, is definitely more in touch with the outside world than she is with a screen. Three times during our Zoom call her microphone connects to a different device (she doesn’t know which) leaving her mouthing silently. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says when she re-connects. ‘I’m not good with technology at the best of times.’
Sarah and her eponymous business are titans of the gardening world. Her company, which delivers seeds and plants to order, was begun from a small cutting patch using just six plants from her mother’s garden. This inspired her first book, The Cutting Garden (1996), which she wrote during maternity leave. She has since written many more and has gained notoriety for her appearances on Gardeners’ World. Her podcast, grow, eat, cook, arrange, is much beloved, as is her garden at Perch Hill, where she regularly teaches gardening courses and which is open to the public to visit on set days.
‘It’s not very nice weather, is it?’ she bemoans when we talk. Wrapped up in a large grey cardigan, she is clearly suffering withdrawal symptoms from enjoying her beloved garden in the sunshine over the winter months. Sarah has had a love of the great outdoors from a young age. She was born a twin in 1963 in Marylebone, London, and was the joint youngest of five children. Her father, John Earle Raven, was an amateur botanist who sparked her interest in plants. He was a classics don at King’s College, the University of Cambridge, where Sarah grew up. ‘I used to run on King's College Chapel’s lead roof as a sort of game,’ she recalls. Her gardener mother, Faith Raven, also had green fingers and inherited the Ardtornish Estate in Lochaber, Scotland, famed for its gardens.
Sarah originally trained as a doctor at the University of London, before a career in gardening came calling.
Sarah's father, John Earle Raven, inspired her life-long fascination with botany.
As a child, Sarah went to a school run by Catholic nuns who, she told Desert Island Discs, thought she was ‘naughty’ and eventually asked her to leave, aged 16. ‘It’s unbelievably beautiful … but I found Cambridge slightly prickly… that whole academic sphere is quite bitchy’, she recalls. Sarah studied for an MA in history at the University of Edinburgh before changing tact to train as a doctor at the University of London, waitressing at the River Café in her free time. ‘[When I graduated] I thought: “Well, what do I really want to do?” I knew a couple of doctors, and I just always admired them, and loved hearing about what they did in their day to day work life, and so I just decided I had to go back to college because I hadn't got physics or chemistry A-level,’ she says.
Shockingly, Sarah’s gamble paid off, despite her receiving just 8% in her first physics end-of-term exam, and she went on to work as a junior doctor at Charing Cross Hospital in London. ‘I really loved it,’ she says, ‘but then I had children, because by the time I came out of that sort of sausage machine [education] I was 30 and I was married and I just wanted a child, basically.’ The gruelling hospital shifts were untenable, Sarah found. She had met her husband, the writer Adam Nicolson, on a skiing holiday, which she was invited to by his sister. After she gave up medicine they moved to East Sussex, to live in Perch Hill.
Sarah and her twin sister as girls picking flowers.
Sarah Raven and her husband Adam Nicolson in their garden at Perch Hill.
For a while, the family also lived at Sissinghurst in Kent, the former home of Vita Sackville-West, who was Adam’s grandmother. Sarah shares two grown-up daughters with Adam, as well as three stepsons from his previous marriage. ‘They are all in London, bar one, and all have kind of professional serious jobs,’ she says, proudly.
Sarah will be speaking at the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 23 about her new book, A Year of Cut Flowers, which is out now.
Your aesthetic hero
I think Vita Sackville-West, she was a gardener, but she also had incredible bohemian tastes in interiors — and I really love her interiors. Very kind of shabby but glamorous, and beautiful textures and very rich colours. I'm married to her grandson, he's sort of grew up in her home, so his aesthetic I also admire very much.
Vita Sackville-West, whose grandson is Sarah's husband, the writer Adam Nicolson.
The music that you work to
I don't. I used to. I find it difficult to concentrate now, which is sad in a way, but I have to have absolute quiet. Even if there's a radio three rooms away, I would need to go and turn that off.
An exhibition that has really impressed you
The Marie Antoinette exhibition at the V&A Museum. I mean, it is a bit of a cliche, because I know a lot of people have written a lot about it, but I really enjoyed it. I botanized when I was there, because, of course, the accuracy of the needlework is incredible, and so a lot of the plants in the fabrics are completely identifiable, and I loved looking at that, as well as the sort of crazy flamboyance of it. I enjoyed it, but it was overcrowded. They've sold too many tickets.
An oil painting of Marie Antoinette by François Hubert Drouais, 1773, courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
What you’d take with you to a desert island
I would definitely say one or other, or ideally both, of my dogs (mongrelly labradoodles called Curly and Dusty). I don't think I'd be allowed to take my daughters, because they have to get on with their lives, but if I could I’d take my family, too.
Your favourite painting
A Tom Hammick. He’s a friend actually, and we have a lot of his stuff, including a huge woodcut of somebody watering a garden, which I absolutely love.
The thing that gets you up in the morning
I get up very early: between 5:15 and 5:30am, and nature and the garden is what gets me up. In the winter, not so much, so I tend to write very early in the morning before work — that's what gets me out of bed. I make a very weak, very long black coffee with very nice coffee in a huge mug, and I come upstairs and I write.
The last thing of note that you bought for yourself
I bought some perfume, but it was actually a present from my husband to me. Does that count? It smells of tomato leaf and one of my greatest joys in life is pinching out my tomatoes. It’s Vétiver Écarlate by L'Artisan Parfumeur.
The items you collect
Oh, God, everything. My current fad is on sale, cashmere jerseys in a small size, so that I can wear them underneath as a kind of under layer. I feel the cold very badly, so sometimes I might even wear three underneath a dress.
The best present you’ve ever received
As a family, we spend a lot of time in Crete, and we really love it, because we're nature freaks, and the wild flowers are amazing. And we spent a winter in Crete, and when we came back, Adam had bought this [a small boat made of clay filled with pomegranates] for my birthday. He had it made. This is a traditional thing — a welcoming house gift — when you set up a new house, because a pomegranate is a sort of a symbol of the home. He found a potter who made it for me.
A book that has inspired you
There's a massive book on Cretan endemic wildflowers, and I find it really inspiring when the weather's a bit crap and spring is coming. Quite often, I just start flicking through it and it just makes me think: ‘Oh yes, there's beauty out there’. I find nature very inspiring and reassuring, so when things are feeling a bit dire in the world, and we have world wars and things, I sort of focus in a lot, and find nature very reassuring, but I think I particularly love wild, abundant beauty, so I just gaze at these pictures.
A possession you’d never sell
A tile that Vita bought in Tehran, when she went travelling. It's just the most beautiful colour, and she was very keen on this colour [a type of turquoise] which came from Isfahan. This particular glaze has got lead in it, so you can't get it anymore, because it's quite toxic. I just really love it. I put a vase on it and, even if it's tiny, it just makes it look so glamorous and beautiful.
The last podcast you listened to
I really love This Cultural Life. I listened to one last night — the Salman Rushdie episode, which is about two years old. I've listened to them all several times. I listened to Tracey Emin yesterday. I just find them such a rich resource of information about what's going on at that moment. But actually even beyond that, I find them really brilliantly broad. I'm not so keen on the actor-y ones, I suppose, just because I'm not a great film or theatre buff, but I love the ones on music, culture, art and artists. I just find it really educational. I really enjoy them. I have a funeral on Tuesday, and it's a four hour drive there and back, and in the past I would have rather dreaded that, but I was just thinking: ‘I'll just download lots of This Cultural Life, and I'll just listen to them again’. I find I hear something different, even if I've heard it before.
Who would play you in a film of your life
Who is the woman who's married to the Mumford and Sons man? Carey Mulligan. She's brilliant in The Ballad of Wallis Island.
A hotel you could go back and back to
I’m not a big hotel person, actually. Because I love cooking, I tend to prefer renting a house to hotels. I did really like this hotel in Deauville in France, on the beach, which is called Hôtel Barrière Le Normandy. Would I go back there again and again? Yes, if I wanted to write. As Adam and I both write, when we're here [at Perch Hill] we get a bit dug into what's going on day to day, and so if we have a deadline, quite often, we might go off somewhere.
The most memorable meal you’ve ever had
Probably globe artichokes served whole with something called Angelica sauce, which isn't made with the herb Angelica, it's hard boiled egg, anchovy, capers, olives, lots of parsley, red wine vinegar and olive oil. I had it all the way through my childhood — I spent a lot of time in Italy as a child, and you would go to the market and buy these amazing globe artichokes at Easter — because they're very early to crop there, and often in Sicily, even earlier. So we've got artichokes in the garden so I make it a lot with, maybe on the side, really good bread and unsalted butter or perhaps some really nice, waxy new potatoes just dug up from the garden and cooked with salt and mint, and possibly a green salad — and that would be it. That would be my most memorable meal.
To see Sarah at the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 23, visit their website. A Year of Cut Flowers: A life of growing and arranging for all seasons by Sarah Raven is out March 12 (Bloomsbury Publishing, Hardback, £30) Photography by Jonathan Buckley.
