Sarah Raven's Garden Tour: Oast, Farmhouse, and Cutting Gardens

Perch Hill Garden Transformation

• 🏡 Sarah Raven shares her garden at Perch Hill, East Sussex, which she has cultivated over 31 years from undeveloped land.
• 💡 The garden serves as an experimental ground for color combinations, plant pairings, container gardening, and growing for cutting and eating.

The Oast Garden: From Car Park to Courtyard

• 🚗 Originally a car park, the Oast Garden was transformed into a sheltered courtyard by building a wall with reclaimed bricks and utilizing an existing oak tree for protection.
• 🪴 Despite heavy clay soil, 10 tons of grit were incorporated to create excellent drainage, allowing plants like lavender and rosemary to thrive.
• 🎨 This garden features a strong color palette of saturated colors, including acid greens and purples, with no white or pastels.

Extending the Flowering Season with Bulbs

• 🌷 Sarah emphasizes the importance of spring bulbs for a continuous display from February to June, acting as a relay race of blooms.
• 🌸 Her favorite tulip is 'Dom Pedro,' a historical breeder tulip with rich, mahogany silk-like petals, which she has worked to propagate from a bulb library.
• 💧 When deadheading tulips, she advises cutting to the first leaf on the stem to encourage bulb bulking rather than seed formation.

The Farmhouse Garden Palette

• ☁️ The Farmhouse Garden, facing south, uses a soft, cool palette of silver, mauve, and white to complement the surrounding East Sussex countryside view.
• 🪴 A 'bulb lasagna' in pots features a succession of tulips like 'Silver Cloud,' 'White Heart,' and 'Double Surprise' for continuous blooms.
• 🐿️ Pot toppers (hardy annuals or biennials) are used to deter gray squirrels from damaging the bulbs underneath.

The Heart of the Garden: The Cutting Garden

• ✂️ The cutting garden, the first area Sarah developed at Perch Hill, is divided into annuals, perennials, and bulbs.
• 🌿 For perennial cut flowers, she advises cutting stems carefully, leaving at least two leaves to allow for photosynthesis and bulb rejuvenation for the following year.
• 🌱 Adding grit to the soil where tulips are grown can encourage them to produce bulbils and naturalize, leading to better succession planting.