The news is likely to have horticulturalists up and down the country reaching not for the secateurs but for the smelling salts.
For as the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden revealed yesterday, life for Sarah Raven, the 62-year-old queen bee of the gardening world, is not exactly a bed of roses right now.
Indeed, emergency pruning measures have been taken to secure the survival of Sarah’s eponymous company, which has drawn nearly one million middle-class customers to her bold, colourful – and costly – floral designs.
After years of soaring sales, the company has been hit by a perfect storm of a post-Covid decline. Plants, bulbs and seeds were big business during lockdown, but Labour’s increased employers’ National Insurance contributions, ‘unseasonal weather patterns’ and a hefty VAT bill, which the firm is currently appealing, have all taken their toll.
But dig a little deeper, and it is clear that all is not well for the writer and entrepreneur who became an overnight sensation with her 1996 debut book The Cutting Garden.
A thread on the Mumsnet website, titled ‘Beware Sarah Raven’ does not pull its punches. In recent days, customers have complained of receiving wrong orders, shoddy goods and late delivery.
‘Photos look amazing on the website,’ wrote one disgruntled client, ‘but products are really poor quality and delivery times equally poor. Of all the plants I’ve ordered, only one has survived a fortnight . . . [it] remains the scrawny weakling in my garden.’
Gardening guru Sarah Raven. Her company has been hit by a perfect storm of a post-Covid decline
Another claimed an order ‘took weeks and weeks to come’ and was ‘incomplete’, adding that when the second part of the shipment came ‘there were literally no seeds in the envelopes’.
A third unhappy shopper wrote: ‘I won’t be using them again. The whole thing is a massive marketing exercise with no focus on the quality of the plants and they have hugely over-extended themselves.’
Raven’s gardening equipment fares little better. ‘I bought some Sarah Raven branded gardening tools for a family member, which snapped in half after very light use,’ wrote one.
Another harrumphed: ‘I ordered an expensive garden tool as a birthday present for a family member, and it took six weeks to arrive – a month after the birthday itself. No warning when I placed the order or apology … Customer services and online tracking were both useless.
Never again!’
All in all it will make uncomfortable reading for the woman whose huge popularity has brought not just fame and recognition but considerable riches and an enviable lifestyle.
Her books are bestsellers, and her podcasts are essential horticultural listening. Her catalogues, with their dreamy pictures of vibrant flowerbeds, are as sought-after as the Boden directory is for clothes. Tours of her own gardens and company headquarters at Perch Hill, East Sussex, have also become hugely popular – though, again, not all customers are happy.
Tours of Raven’s own gardens and company headquarters at Perch Hill, East Sussex, have also become hugely popular – though not all customers are happy
One wrote online: ‘We also went to one of her Perch Hill days out, costing £250 including lunch, and her head gardener was wonderful – but Sarah herself couldn’t have been less interested, a very bland ‘get me out of here’ presentation.’
To her credit, Raven has not shied from the criticism and her firm has admitted that ‘our service level has not been as good as we would have hoped’.
Raven said the struggles had not been helped by hot spring weather and ‘boxes sitting in couriers’ vans for too long’. In the face of all these difficulties, she and her husband Adam Nicolson, a languid aristocrat and well-connected author – whose ancestral home, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, is renowned for its enchanting garden – have resorted to drastic action.
They have put the company, Sarah Raven’s Kitchen & Garden, into administration – a move that has allowed her to re-acquire it, aided by a small group of unnamed investors.
Reaction to this management buy-out has been ‘variable’, says Raven. ‘No one likes it of course … This is my life’s work. I’ve spent the past 30 years building this business so it’s something that I feel passionately about … We’ve ended up where we’ve ended up, but it’s not the end.’ It was, she insisted, ‘the least bad option’.
Raven, a former doctor and mother of two who started the company in 2008, added: ‘I genuinely think for the customer this will be better. We’re going to do less risky things. We’re going to carry on doing what we do well and trying to do it even better.’
It is, nevertheless, a sobering moment for the woman for whom everything up to now has been a progress of glittering triumph.
Perch Hill is the home and garden of Sarah Raven and Adam Nicolson
So who is the woman who has been described as doing for gardening what Delia Smith did for cookery? And what is the story of her husband’s racy past?
The daughter of a Cambridge classics don – and keen amateur botanist – Raven got a degree in history at Edinburgh University before setting up as a florist. In her mid-20s she had a career change, retraining in medicine to become a hospital doctor.
Around this time, she met divorcee Nicolson, now 67, whose father Nigel’s book about his parents’ unconventional marriage caused a huge stir when it came out in 1973.
It told how diplomat, politician and author Harold Nicolson and his snobbish wife Vita Sackville-West had conducted an open marriage for years. He had affairs with male lovers, and she had a scandalous relationship with the writer and socialite Violet Trefusis, whose sister was Queen Camilla’s grandmother.
‘Sarah arrived at quite a traumatic point in my life,’ Adam Nicolson, then a father of three, later wrote. ‘I was 30, my first marriage had broken down, the publishing business I’d set up with my cousin had pretty much collapsed and I’d just been mugged in London. Everything seemed dire.’
They met on a skiing holiday. ‘My first impression of her was that she was incredibly cool,’ he recalled. ‘She’d do things like sit on the chairlift and roll a cigarette with one hand. She was beautiful and full of life. She still is. We fell madly in love.’
Raven met her husband Adam Nicholson – the 5th Baron Carnock, though he does not use his title – on a skiing holiday
Nicolson, who is the 5th Baron Carnock, though he does not use his title, had already had his own brush with bohemia. With his first wife Olivia Fane, he struck an agreement that each would tolerate the other’s extramarital affairs, as she later revealed in a book of essays.
‘The rules were: when my husband was abroad for a period exceeding two weeks, he could have an affair providing (a) he had my permission in advance, and (b) the woman didn’t live in England.
‘My quid pro quo was that I should be allowed ten snogs a year and one two-week affair every other year providing the location of the aforesaid affair was Stoke Newington.’
Their marriage did not last because both broke their own rules.
When asked if her marriage to Nicolson was monogamous, Raven said primly: ‘We have a conventional marriage. It was up to Adam and his first wife what arrangement they had, but for me, especially once you have children, fidelity is very important.’
It was while pregnant with her second daughter that she realised hospital hours were not conducive to having a family. Returning to her first love, she planted a flower garden and began giving talks to friends and neighbours.
Soon it seemed only polite to cook them lunch, too, so her courses began to take shape. TV appearances on Gardeners’ World followed, plus books and enough money to gradually expand.
And until this year that is exactly what happened. Along with the 14 gardening and cookery books, there’s the tulip collection (launched with Sir Andy Murray’s wife Kim), the autumn bulb collection, the Lincolnshire nursery, the 100-plus staff and a turnover that in 2021 reached £27 million.
Suddenly it’s all change. The nursery is to be sold, and turnover will be significantly down.
For the queen of seeds, the grass is no longer greener on the other side.
