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Only a few days after my wife, Sarah Raven, and I moved into Perch Hill in May 1994, we had a visit from one of our new neighbours down the lane. East Sussex was looking as beautiful as it ever might. Birds were singing in the hornbeams. Creamy wood anemones frothed in the ditches beside the farm gate. I thought I had heard a turtledove in the stand of tall coppiced ash trees on the far side of our fields. The neighbour was full of welcome and advice – ‘Try to keep the sheep’s legs pointing down if you can’ – but as he left, settling his tea cup on the table, he uttered the only sentence that stayed with us: ‘You do know, don’t you, that you’ve managed to buy the poorest farm in the parish?’
Ah yes. A slight deflating of the balloon. Perhaps we should have understood. We were confronted with what was, essentially, a trashed landscape. The roof of the Victorian barn had been blown off in the 1987 gale and replaced with palegreen plastic sheeting. A 1940s cowshed was clearly unusable and its asbestos roof was fraying at the edges. Other outbuildings were ready to collapse. Clusters of pole barns looked like the remains of an ad hoc industrial site. Most of the old oaks had been cut down in the 1960s to make way for them. The ceilings in the farmhouse were too low for me to stand up in. Three goldfish lived in a loo-sized concrete pond outside the kitchen door. There was a small lawn. The farm was little better. Nothing faintly usable in the way of gates or fencing. Wall-to-wall thistles. A flock of thin, rented-in sheep. The whole place felt bruised.
What, you might ask, had brought us here? Oddly enough, it felt unbelievably beautiful, a place that had been here since the 16th century, its dozen or so ancient fields falling away from the house like the folds of a pleated tablecloth, the long views across a green Sussex that everywhere faded into a distant blue. Besides we were relatively young and there was time. But how to make a garden? And what garden to make? Sarah is not one to doubt her own enterprise and with hardly a day’s pause she plunged in. Paths, pots, old coppers, fruit trees, hedges – all attacked with a vigour and sense of expansiveness that have not diminished over the past three decades. Hers has been the surge of a multi-stage rocket, one that still looks as if it has miles to go and planets to discover.
The result is the very opposite of the semi-melancholic fadingness that lies half hidden within every corner of Sissinghurst (WoI July 2023). The garden at Perch Hill is ebullient, encompassing, enlarging, full of an appetite for life and beauty and colour. It does not lie neatly to one side but makes giant claims on you. Sarah wrote a book in the 1990s called The Bold and Brilliant Garden, drawing on many of the lessons and principles she had gathered from working for a while with Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter (WoI March 2011), and certainly boldness and brilliance are both part of her character and a good part of this garden.
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Between the farmhouse and the oasthouse is a space that used to be the farmyard but which is now filled with Henri Rousseau-esque foliage and colour that can very nearly overwhelm you. At the end of the growing season, before the frosts, you have to push through its leafy, tendrilthick hugeness in a way you never have to at Sissinghurst but as you would perhaps in the rainforests of Costa Rica, or if you were a child first making her way through a garden she didn’t know but whose paths would inevitably lead on towards the secrets its damp depths might hold.
If Sissinghurst is essentially a garden for the end of the day, Perch Hill is a garden for mornings. That unaffectedly positive grasp of what is excitingly present is its core. Nothing about it poses elegantly in restrained pastel shades. Or in any reflection of ancient châteaux or manors. This is a garden that unequivocally happens now, without a whiff of nostalgia. It does, perhaps, have something of a 1990s feel about it, a place in which Naomi Campbell and Eva Herzigová would feel happily at home. Or where, if only Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karan had been Sussex dairy farmers, they would have assembled their extravaganzas.
But how has she done this in a place where, for all its beauty, fecundity was never in great supply? First, large quantities of spent mushroom compost and then farmyard manure have been delivered and dug into otherwise intractable clay soils. Grit has been added by the lorryload for drainage. Hedges, fences and walls have all been grown or built to keep the hilltop west wind at bay. Trees have been planted, and an entire hedge from the garden Sarah made at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1998 now provides a 12-metre-high windbreak on the southern side.
Swaths of tulips and narcissi in the spring, alliums and roses in the summer, dahlias a-go-go at the end of the garden year: a wonderful circus-troupe cavalcade of flowering high spirits dance and cavort their way through the Perch Hill year. I don’t know anywhere that exudes such positivity month after month and week after week. Every year, we go to the Netherlands in the spring and again in late summer to find new bulbs and dahlias with which to keep the show on the road. Trials are made, giant compost palaces are built, new varieties cultivated, fresh beds are opened. And so nothing stales, nothing is too exhaustingly ‘seen before’ and nothing about this whole 30-year-long scheme feels as if it has not been the very best thing anyone could have done with their lives. The poorest farm in the parish? Ha!
A version of this article appeared in the September 2023 Issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
