It’s a busy morning at Sarah Raven’s horticultural empire, Perch Hill Farm. Situated deep in the , it’s home to a series of farm buildings, a restored oast house with its pointy magician’s-hat roof and, as of last year, a smart new orangery-style greenhouse where visitors can enjoy lunch. There , trumpet-like with pink and purple petals and butter-yellow centres, fluffy white phlox, roses the colour of a cappuccino and Raven’s famous dahlias.
It’s a playground of colour – quite literally because Perch Hill is Raven’s seed-testing ground as well as her home. “I like being in this very unfashionable part of ,” she says, taking a break from a branding photoshoot taking place nearby (she sells everything garden-related now: clogs, aprons, vases, cards, gardening tools) and comes to sit down. “I mean, it’s amazing, there’s no Daylesford [here].
” Daylesford is the chic lifestyle brand built by , which offers an alternative white/beige pristine vision of country living – where you have to be a zillionaire to buy a cashmere blanket. Raven’s seed mixes are not the cheapest either, but the collections come with her all-important imprimatur. She has put the mix together: heights, colour, feel, mood, soil.
You are buying a piece of her. It’s thirty years since and her husband, the writer Adam Nicolson, moved into Perch Hill from London with their baby daughter. Raven was then a newly qualified doctor, aged 31 (her first degree was in history at Edinburgh.