Feast Food

Sarah Raven is not only an inspirational cook and gardener, she was also once a doctor – knowledge that informs her new healthy eating cookbook. From her idyllic farmhouse in the Sussex Weald, she talks to ANGELA WINTLE about her passion for “good, good food”

- Sarah Raven

SARAH Raven is my constant companion in the long winter evenings. When the rain is thumping against the window, the wind is cheerfully lifting the slates off the roof and a lone fox is screeching in the chill, inky blackness, there are few things more comforting than the Sarah Raven YouTube channel. Take my word for it. In the dread months of January and February, her tips on creating a hand-tied bunch of flowers, planting summer flower containers or growing a hardy annual cutting patch soon drive those winter blues away.

Spend too long in her bucolic wonderland, however, and the seeds of dissatisfaction will quickly take root. Your barren flower borders, cracked paving slabs and patchy lawn littered with next door’s cat’s unmentionables will leave you restless and malcontented, and you’ll be ordering sweet pea, zinnia and cosmos seedlings, a floristry kit and a year-round veg course, courtesy of sarahraven.com, with a zealous fervour you had no inkling you possessed.

Sarah, of course, is accustomed to greeneyed journalists marvelling at her many accomplishments. Visit her East Sussex home at Perch Hill, near Burwash, in high summer when her garden is heavy with colour and scent, and you’d be mistaken for thinking you’d walked into a heavenly Country Living garden shoot. Come to think of it, there’s a good chance you will have because she’s done a fair few over the years.

And she’s not just a flower expert. She took a degree in history, retrained in medicine to become a doctor at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, and after her eldest daughter was born, reinvented herself, setting up a floristry business and a sideline in writing, while establishing a garden and cookery school at the farm she owns with her husband, the writer Adam Nicolson (Vita Sackville-West’s grandson).