Sarah Raven’s garden revisited – lovely dahlias

Have been insanely busy this past week – I meant to write this days ago, but just no time.  Last week I went with WI friends to Sarah Raven’s garden at Perch Hill near Brightling. Then we had friends Sue and Alex from Birmingham to stay, and yesterday I had an absolutely exhausting day helping at a WI do at a place called Great Ote Hall near Burgess Hill. This is a really quick post, so more about those other things next time. Back to Sarah Raven..

A wet morning

    
      Avid Battleaxe readers may remember that I visited the garden before, again with the WI, back in 2014, and wrote a not very complimentary post about it.
     If you want to find out more about Sarah Raven, read the earlier post. This time, people said she was walking about the garden, but I didn’t see her.
    The garden seemed much better than in 2014, despite the weather being very dodgy and plants flopping all over the place. The range of garden available to view has also been greatly expanded.

Different area of garden..

     Odder still, unless I have gone mad, the prices of her stuff seem to have got lower. Last time I blenched at the price of seeds etc., but this time there were loads for a mere £1.95.
     The café has also been expanded, and the price of coffee and cheese scone was perfectly tolerable.
     Most of these photos are of dahlias. To be honest, I don’t love them that much – they are an awful fiddle to grow and I always fear there will be earwigs lurking in the petals, but these Sarah Raven ones are just beautiful.

      Last time, I speculated about the extraordinary absence of slugs, but this time, we found a huge one….

      To be honest, I hadn’t wanted to go in the first place – it looked too wet, but as so often, I was glad I did. I think we all enjoyed ourselves.
      Three final pretty pictures. I really wanted to capture these rain drops on a delphinium, but the photo has not worked that well.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comments from Google+