Sarah Raven

Sarah Clare Raven (born 3 February 1963) is an English gardener, cook, television presenter, journalist, and author of several books.

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Quotes

I remember more the atmosphere than specific memories — being in the garden and hanging out with both my parents while they were doing things, walking through, smelling the flowers. I was very keen on wildflowers from a young age – that very much formed the basis of my love of gardening. Wild collecting dictated what we had in the gardens. On holidays in the Mediterranean, my parents collected plants such as artemisia and tender bulbs – we had them long before they were fashionable. Euphorbias, too.
- as quoted by Dominic Murphy in: (1 April 2011) "All about my mother. Dominic Murphy talks to three high-profile gardeners and their mums about what they've learned from each other. And what they've rejected...". The Guardian.

I'm on a mission to get more of us to grow British wild flowers in our gardens. As ever-increasing numbers of these plants vanish from the countryside, our own private spaces become more important – and genuinely useful. Between us, our gardens cover more than a million acres, which far exceeds the total area of all our nature reserves.
We need to think of our gardens as little reservoirs in which British biodiversity can survive. In time, it will spread out from there, but if we make our gardens wild flower hot spots, then at least we know things aren't disappearing at quite such a rate. There's plenty of evidence from the work of etymologists such as Dr Jennifer Owen (see her brilliant book Wildlife Of A Garden: A Thirty-Year Study) that gardens can provide rich habitats, with flowers the key part of that food chain.
- (27 April 2012) "Gardens: British wildflowers. Native British wildflowers are vanishing fast, yet they're long-flowering and easy to grow. Plus, they're in flower just when pollinators need them most". The Guardian.

'Madame Alfred Carrière'
This was the first rose planted by Vita at Sissinghurst in 1930, before the deeds were even signed, and it quickly covered most of the south face of the South Cottage and in Vita and Harold's day was left to 'render invisible' most of the front of the house and trained around her bedroom window to pour scent into the house for months at a stretch. It is still there, and now has a huge trunk wider than my husband's thigh.
- "Chapter 6. Cram, Cram, Cram". Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West and the Creation of a Garden. St. Martin's Press. 2014. ISBN 9781466865983. (406 pages; See photograph following the page with the quote.)

We moved to Perch Hill in 1994 from London and found a rather ramshackle ex-dairy farm with a lot of concrete, corrugated iron and a small garden with a goldfish pond on the south side of the house. Since then, we converted the farm into an organic 90 acres, putting in new hedges on old lines, trying to encourage wildflowers into the meadows and introducing our own herd of Sussex cattle and a flock or Romney-cross sheep.
- A Year Full of Flowers: Gardening for all seasons. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2021. p. 11. ISBN 9781526640390. (384 pages; photographs by Jonathan Buckley)

Let’s start in the garden. This year cookery writers are as happy digging and planting as slicing and braising. Sarah Raven is a great gardener and, on the evidence of her latest book, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (Chatto & Windus, £35), she’s a good cook too. This is a book for a lifetime of cooking: there are more than 400 recipes based on fruit and vegetables. It is not vegetarian — she uses fish and meat too — but vegetables and fruit are to the fore. Raven’s recipes are simple, practical and enticing, and there isn’t one I don’t want to cook. The book is divided into two-month chunks and full of suggestions (snip off pea tendrils for salads, or leave a few beetroot in the ground to produce an early spring salad leaf) and tips on the most tasty varieties to grow. Her ten courgette recipes will sort out an impending green avalanche, and she has five good marrow recipes for when the wretched plants have triumphed.
- Elfreda Pownall, (December 8, 2007) "A choice of cookery books". The Spectator.