Sarah Raven - Perch Hill

Perch Hill is the cutting garden for Sarah Raven. Located in East Sussex, down a winding country lane, you are greeted with views are of the rolling countryside and are transported to a world of calm.

It's not open to the public everyday, you need to check their events calendar and book tickets in advance. I first visited here a few years ago which cost £5. 

Now, it costs £15 entry or £30 if you want lunch included, which is what I opted for today. If I am honest, I think this is far too much money to charge and whilst I enjoyed my visit, I felt a bit ripped off.

Sarah Raven and Adam Nicolson moved to Perch Hill 24 years ago from London. They found a rather ramshackle ex-dairy farm with a lot of concrete, corrugated iron and not much else. Since then, they have converted the farm into an organic 90 acres, putting in many new hedges on old lines, trying to encourage wild flowers into the meadows and introducing a herd of Sussex cattle and a flock of Romney cross sheep.

The constant supply of favourite flowers, (cut hard for Sarah Raven's flower arranging courses) comes from the 2 large cutting gardens. The original is used mainly to trial perennials for picking, and the second is the annual cutting garden where the beds are filled with hardy and half-hardy annuals and biennials, with two or even three different crops in the same square foot of soil in one calendar year. 

Dahlias and chrysanthemums have their own trial garden. Every year new varieties of dahlias go in there, gathered from Sarah's trips to Holland the previous autumn. Another garden is for testing new annuals from seed, seeing how many buckets they produce through the whole season per square metre and whether they are easy to grow. Sloped gardens round the school grow edible crops in an ornamental way and serve as trial grounds, as well as growing produce (particularly salads and herbs) to supply the school kitchen with home-grown fruit and vegetables.

There are also four purely ornamental gardens at Perch Hill, not dedicated to harvesting – the Oast garden with an extravagant mix of colour and structure (salvias, cardoons, artichokes, brilliantly coloured dahlias, zinnias, gladioli) and the front farmhouse garden, which is designed to have a calmer feel, with perennials and roses in soft pinks and blues.

*Spot the escape artist chicken!

Two additional gardens include the rose and herb garden. The herbs are the best culinary varieties (advised by Jekka McVicar), and are picked for the school kitchen nearby. In the winter of 2016, the Dutch Yard was created. The well was reopened and the whole area bricked and filled with pots and classic Dutch yard plants such as hydrangeas and a mulberry tree.

There are two wildflower meadows, one of which contains a willow bed which combines a silver birch coppice to give a good wood supply to be used for plant supports around the garden.

It was interesting to see how the garden has changed over the years. If you would like to read my previous post on Perch Hill you can find it here

As I mentioned at the start of this post my ticket today included lunch. Upon arrival I was handed a menu and the choices were all very fresh and tempting. I went for the greek courgette filo tart with salad and potatoes. It wasn't the best thing I had ever eaten and the glass of watered down lime squash that came with it was disappointing too. I'm not sure if they are serving lunch this way due to covid or if it is easier for them to serve this way and manage the numbers, but I preferred the large slices of quiche they used to serve. An offer of tea and cake wouldn't have gone amiss either!

Sorry to be a negative Nancy but I like eating and take my food seriously! Salad grumbles aside, I had a very relaxing morning here and am pleased with these pictures. It really is very pretty.

I had a mooch in the shop as I was hoping to buy a garden trug but I couldn't see any so I left empty handed but they do sell a variety of garden bits and also gifts/candles/vases.

After this I popped into Bateman's as it is only a few minutes away so I will write a post on that soon!