大象传媒

Jenny Uglow, the biographer and historian whose book 'A Little History of British Gardening' beautifully epitomised the national love of gardens now turns history on its head to consider the less lovely aspects of the British character that blossom in the garden.

In her first essay she looks at our tendency to escape, to bury our heads in the soil, if not the sand, when perhaps we shouldn't. Through history the garden has been a retreat from the world - at no time more so than during the reign of Charles I who took sanctuary in his garden arcadia, blind to the struggles that would soon overwhelm him and plunge the country into civil war.
Jenny traces this tendency for escapism through the Victorian age and the hippies of the 1960s to the present day.

Produced by Susan Marling
This is a Just Radio Ltd production for Radio 3.