How Does Your Garden Grow? (A Colour Special) - In Conversation with Sarah Raven

There are moments in gardening, and in life, when everything seems to come full circle. For me, this is one of those moments. I’m thrilled to share a conversation with Sarah Raven, a true inspiration whose Perch Hill garden has been a guiding light in my own growing and floristry journey. When Sarah invited me to create a dahlia collection for her, it was a chance to make a nod to the lessons and colours I’ve absorbed over the years. You can read the questions I answered for Sarah about the making of the collection, and my growing journey here in West Sussex.

In our interview, Sarah opens up about her thoughtful approach to colour in the garden, I’ve long enjoyed the way she organises colour palettes, and it was such a joy to be able to ask her some of my burning questions. We delve into everything from her early days of experimenting with bold colour schemes to her current obsession with more nuanced, nature-inspired palettes. Whether it’s drawing inspiration from a breathtaking sunrise on Scotland’s west coast or a shell-collecting stroll in the Outer Hebrides, Sarah’s insights remind us that beauty in gardening often comes from the most unexpected sources.

Join me as we explore her process, her passion, and the ever-evolving language of colour—a conversation that celebrates creativity, inspiration, and the timeless art of gardening. Thanks Sarah!

Sarah Raven by Jonathan Buckley

You’re well-known for your thoughtful approach to colour in the garden. Many gardeners struggle with balancing colour and form in their plantings. What guidance would you give to someone wanting to create a harmonious and visually exciting garden, without the colours clashing or feeling chaotic?

When I started gardening and growing cut flowers 30 or so years ago, a lot of gardens and arrangements were either one colour (with the green of the leaves of course) such as all white, or the opposite and including every colour in the rainbow and I found them either a little obvious and dull or a bit manic, like a packet of Liquorice All-Sorts.

I’m instinctively drawn to colour and would prefer a more harmonious mix than either of the above, and I found I tended to combine together two flowers of the same or a similar colour, one bigger and more sensational, the Bride, than the other, the Bridesmaid, and then, finally and crucially for me, the element I call the Gatecrasher, a zap of strong contrast, but just a sprinkle. I still do this now, so a drift of a similar tone in a border, a crimson or carmine with a splash of a brilliant-coloured vermilion poppy floating through. Or a large pot of white cosmos with the spires of acidanthera (also white) and then a purple salvia in contrast, but also picking up the secondary colour of the acidanthera. This is my Bride, Bridesmaid, Gatecrasher rules.

Milli hanging out at the Perch Hill garden with La Belle Epoque Dahlia from the collection captured by Paris ( we honestly pinch ourselves every time we get to come and pick and create here!)

Your colour guides have been such a helpful resource for gardeners. How do you go about organising and simplifying colour choices to make them more accessible, especially for those who might find it overwhelming?

So, I came up with 4 main palettes I work with all the time - Dark and Rich (Venetian velvets, crimson, deep purple, vermillion and bronze), Boiled Sweet (as they sound, lime, lemon, strawberry, raspberry, orange, blackcurrant and sometimes clear cobalt blue which takes this palette to Stained Glass). These two are both saturated and intense.

And then Soft and Warm, the Cashmere Jersey palette and soft and cool, the Champs Elysee. These two are based on white and are the pastel tones, the 1st mixed with warm colours so making cafe-au-lait, ivory, peach and apricot, the 2nd mixed with cool tones making mauve, pure white, and cool yellow.

I play around with the palettes picking a flower of all the things I’m interested in that day and shuffle them around till the grouping feels beautiful and harmonious, through different shades but all working well together, with nothing jarring. And if I want to come up with a design when there aren't plenty of flowers, say like now in the winter, I have a huge box of coloured candles to work out palettes and have used ribbons and skeins of wool or embroidery silks in the past. They give you the same volume and 3 dimensionality of colour you get from a flower, whereas I find paper colour charts or even painted cards a bit dead and flat in comparison. I’ve never enjoyed working with them so much.

The Dahlia Collection Milli put together for Sarah. The Dahlias I put in the collection are ‘Caitlin’s Joy’, ‘Natalie G’, and ‘La Belle Epoque’.

Our preferences for colour can change over time. Have there been any particular colours or colour combinations that you've come to appreciate more (or less) over the years, either in your personal garden or in your work with plants?

Yes absolutely. I used to use mainly the 1st two palettes and wrote a whole book about gardening with just them - The Bold and Brilliant Garden, but now I am drawn to the Cashmere Jersey lot as much if not more, often using crimson or bronze to stop the soft and warm lot from becoming a bit cloying. That’s their only downside - this palette can get a bit too ’soppy’ for me, too kind of strawberry or apricot mousse and OTT sweet and over-feminine. You need a bit of rigour from the darker, richer shade to give balance.

It was such a thrill to put a collection together for Sarah, I think it falls into her Soft and Warm category, and I hope it give lots of inspiration for shapes and colours for you to grow this year.

Predicting colour trends in gardening must involve a lot of intuition and observation. How do you approach forecasting what colours or palettes will capture gardeners’ imaginations in upcoming seasons?

I think people like you Milli have been influential in this. With the rise of IG - for good or bad - individual florists (and to be honest these are more often than not women or gay men) their taste and creativity has direct access to the world…. And with that has come a rise of the more feminine in plant and garden and its role in inspiring others. That’s a thoroughly good thing. The alpha male loves yellow and red, big and bold, that sounds like a cliche and that I’m being sexist, but in my experience of trial fields and plant breeding over 30 years, TRUE!

I don’t do much IG posting myself (increasingly as I get older I need privacy) but flick through it every few days and then can see the way people are going and pick and choose my inspiration. Like sitting with a pile of magazines and books in the old days, I then collect together in my head or take a screen shot of something I was drawn to.

OR really often with me, it’s something in nature that provides me with inspiration. I’m on the west coast of Scotland writing right now and we’ve had the most magnificent set of sunrises over the last couple of weeks. I have taken pictures and will do a tulip collection in April following the colours on the sky as slavishly as I can BECAUSE they are so beautiful and work so well together with no cleverness or artifice. Another example is a dahlia collection we have just launched called Shells on The Beach dahlia collection. That was inspired by a shell collecting walk I did on Taransay, in the Outer Hebrides as long ago as 2018.

When you’re out in the field selecting plants to make available to gardeners, what criteria or inspiration guide your colour choices? Are there certain plants or colour combinations that you feel particularly drawn to at the moment?
With me, more and more, it’s the dahlia. They’re such a democratic flower - super easy to grow (if you know how to deal with slugs and snails ), you can grow many varieties in a pot so they’re suited to even a sunny balcony, rather than needing any garden, they are cut-and-come-again so provide flowers for outside, they flower for 4 months solid, AND the more you pick, the more they flower. Finally, with all the current breeding, there is a dahlia for every taste. So I’m putting a lot of time and energy into bringing the colour palettes I love and marrying them to dahlias (which I love too!) - with nature never far from my mind, so ideally creating ones good for bees, butterflies and birds. You then have the best possible flower that could ever exist. 

Thanks again to Sarah for all your insights on growing with colour! We can’t wait to see what new dahlia beauties you’ll be making available for us to grow and work with over the next few years.