Sarah Raven - A Year Full of Flowers

Wildflower scenes like those pictured on the left inspired me to become a gardener. My goal is for my garden (which is pictured on the right) to have a similar colour- and flower-packed look and feel.

What I love is different. I like plants jam-packed, as you might get in nature, and Im sure thats why I love plant trials, not just for the experimentation and for the lessons learnt, but for the visual results one plant, in many different forms, repeated over a large area as if it has spread there naturally.

Nature often produces a single flush of flower, but in a garden, one needs succession. Thats what Ive been working on at Perch Hill. We have different plants taking centre stage from one week and one month and one year to the next. I use so many annuals, biennials, tender perennials and bulbs, that the froth changes all the time. In fact, in parts of the garden, if you stood in one place in June, youd hardly recognise it the following June as so many of the plants will have changed. The bones are the same, but the colour-givers are often new. Its these waves of colour, rolling up into the garden one after another that keep me dreaming and thinking of new ideas.

Abundance is pretty easy to achieve during the full-on growing season when you have families like tulips, roses and dahlias up your sleeve, but there are almost equally strong performers in February and November, just not so many of them. That makes them doubly worth planting. Ive spent years trying to discover as many of those early and late performers as possible, to help maintain our high colour bar.

I want every direction you look in at Perch Hill to be like a May ball in full, dressed-up parade. Even in the trials, I want a sociable mix of different plants, not just one or two. I love playing with combinations until I find one that works on every level: structure, floweriness, staying power and a spirit-lifting surge of colour. Those are the combinations youll find here. There are no great rarities, no-tricky-to-grow challenging plants, but easy, life-enhancing colour and flower performers.

Perch Hill

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 of Romney-cross sheep.

Like most farmhouse gardens, we have different areas given over to different purposes. The first garden I made was the cutting garden, and I used it mainly to trial plants for picking. I have now divided this area into two, one filled with perennials, the other with annuals, hardy and half-hardy, and biennials, with two or even three different crops in the same square metre of soil in one calendar year.

Dahlias and chrysanthemums are important to me and we made a trial garden just for them. Every year new varieties go in, gathered from my trips to Holland and elsewhere the previous autumn.