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If you’re a regular Gardenista reader, you’re likely already familiar with Sarah Raven. But if you’re not, here’s the easiest way to describe her: She’s the Martha Stewart of the U.K. A tireless gardener, writer, cook, TV personality, entrepreneur, and general arbiter of good taste, Sarah has spent a lifetime crafting beauty and meaning in the domestic realm. She hosts workshops at her floriferous farm Perch Hill in East Sussex, England. She’s written stacks of gardening books and harvest-focused cookbooks, the latest being an updated version of Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (with a new cover and introduction). She runs a respected mail-order plant nursery. And she hosts the podcast Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange with colleague Arthur Parkinson.
Despite all her commitments, Sarah found time to answer our Quick Takes questions. Read on for her expert gardening recommendations—including her genius tip for using lemonade to keep cut flowers fresh!
Photography courtesy of Sarah Raven, unless otherwise noted.
It was picking flowers for my father who was recovering from an operation—a small sherry glass of crocus and iris in February. It’s still one of my favorite ways of having flowers in the house. They’re mini simple jewels.
Keble Martin’s The Concise British Flora in Colour. I used it from when I was a child and it’s fantastic and nostalgic for me.
Giardino_di_hera’s account shows their wonderful garden in southern Italy. It’s just like the garden I dream of and hope to make on a plot of land we’ve just bought in Crete.
Colorful. Jam-packed. Nature-filled.
There are three: Trachelospermum jasminoides, honeysuckles (many), and Sarcococca.
They are also a few! Variegated, over-fussy leaves, hugely heavy double begonias with flowers so huge they hang their heads with the weight of petals and double bedding pelargoniums with no nectar or pollen for pollinators.
Always the dahlia—no doubt.
Dead-heading and staking are both essential—no garden can survive looking good until the autumn without quite a bit of both.
Stumperies—they feel too contrived to me!
You should put flat lemonade in your cut flower water. This has citric acid and carbonic acid (CO2 in liquid forms weak acid). By changing pH you decrease bacterial reproduction and enable the flowers to last longer.
Color is everything, not architectural and structural plants.
Source of water, even if it’s a shallow plate/tray with stones in. The birds and pollinators need tons of water on a hot day. The plate/tray also needs a lip so the insects don’t drown. Keep it full and keep it clean.
Soft, reclaimed red-bricks.
Hori-hori knife. It’s brilliant for weeding, even better for planting, and great for teasing open the structure of the soil
A dress always!
To have cut flowers around the house and use cut-and-come-again easy salads and herbs like Salad Rocket and Flat-leaved parsley in recipes.
Mine!
Lovely huge citrus trees as much for their winter blossom (and its magnificent, seductive fragrance) as their fruit.
Sissinghurst white garden in the UK. It’s best in mid-June, ideally at the start or end of the day.
Keeps me happy, content, engaged, calm, centered. I’d be a much lesser person without gardening and nature and walking out into it for an hour or two every morning at 5am in summer.
Thanks so much, Sarah! (Follow her on Instagram @sarahravenperchhill.)
For our full archive of Quick Takes, go here.
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