Sarah Raven, gardener and writer

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sarah Raven is one of Britain’s best known gardeners. Since her debut book, The Cutting Garden in 1996 she has written for national newspapers and magazines and shared her gardening knowledge as a broadcaster.

Sarah’s love for gardening started with her family. Her father John was a Classics scholar at Cambridge and a keen amateur botanist and her mother Faith introduced Sarah to the joys of cutting and arranging flowers.

Following her father’s death when she was just seventeen, Sarah read History at the University of Edinburgh before deciding to pursue a career as a doctor. It was whilst she was on maternity leave from her medical training that Sarah began to cultivate her own garden which led to her first book, The Cutting Garden.

After the success of her first book, Sarah set up her eponymous business which has evolved from a kitchen table start-up to successful global brand. Sarah continues to write, her latest book, A Year Full of Pots was published earlier this year.

Sarah lives in East Sussex with her husband, the writer Adam Nicholson. She has three stepsons and two daughters.

DISC ONE: See My Baby Jive - Wizzard DISC TWO: Dashing White Sergeant - Jimmy Shand DISC THREE: Don’t You (Forget About Me) - Simple Minds DISC FOUR: You Can Dance (If You Want To) - Go Go Lorenzo & The Davis Pinckney Project DISC FIVE: September - Earth, Wind and Fire DISC SIX: Can’t Take My Eyes Off You - Andy Williams DISC SEVEN: Rocket Man (I Think It's Going To Be A Long, Long Time) - Elton John DISC EIGHT: Spring 1. Composed by Antonio Vivaldi, recomposed by Max Richter and performed by Daniel Hope (violin) with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, conducted by André de Ridder

Luxury: An ever-cleaning linen sheet bed with a hot (and cold) water bottle Book: The Flowers of Crete by John Fielding & Nicholas Turland Castaway’s Favourite: September - Earth, Wind and Fire

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Mugabi Turya

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Disks podcast.
0:08.6	Every week I ask my guest to choose the 8 tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they
0:14.3	were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons the music is shorter than
0:19.7	the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening. Oh, My castaway this week is the gardener and writer Sarah Raven.
0:49.4	She was a new mother and working as a junior doctor when she took on the commission to write her first book, The Cousin Garden in 1996.
0:57.0	Stepping back from medicine to write about her love of gardening may sound like a new frontier. In fact fact it was a return to her roots.
1:05.0	Her father was a keen amateur botanist and as a child she would accompany him on road trips in search of specimens.
1:12.0	Plants were completely in my blood, she remembers. I didn't know it at the time, but my path was already set.
1:18.0	Her passion became her livelihood. A kitchen table's startup-up selling seeds has blossomed into a
1:24.4	multi-million pound company and that first best-selling book was followed by many
1:29.1	more. Of her own garden she says it feeds me on every level I think about it from the moment I get up to the
1:36.1	moment I go to sleep I can't imagine life without it
1:39.8	Sarah Raven welcome to desert island discs oh. Oh, thank you so much.
1:43.4	That's such a nice introduction.
1:45.0	Well, you're very welcome.
1:47.0	We're really glad to have you here, Sarah, but I do think that a trip to your
1:49.5	garden in East Sussex would be therapeutic for all of us.
1:52.2	So why don't we start by you taking
1:54.0	us there? If we were to step into your garden together at Perch Hill, what would we
1:58.3	see? What would we smell? Oh so much so the roses are just coming to an end, but the sweet peas are following straight on behind them really.
2:08.0	And then on to other lovely, unusual centered things like the center gladiololus acid anthra which I really like which has got a sort of
	...

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