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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: A Dark History of British Gardening

The Essay: A Dark History of British Gardening: Episode 3: Hubris

Factual: Homes & Gardens: Gardens

A Dark History of British Gardening

Episode 3

Episode 3: Hubris

Hubris

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, A Dark History of British Gardening, HubrisClose menu

Historian Jenny Uglow explores at how pride and hubris flourish in our gardens.

Jenny Uglow explores how gardens have been home to wrong-headed ambition and failed dreams - from the Tudors to the Modernists.

Jenny Uglow plots the history of hubris in the British garden. Gardens have always been places where human ambition has been writ large. The Tudors knew well how to make a spectacular garden that could win favour with the monarch and preferment at court. They made fountains that flowed with wine, mock castles lit with fireworks and grew wonderful plants from the New World.

Gardeners have wanted to tame nature - to sculpt the landscape in massive schemes like Capability Brown or to scorn Nature completely like the Modernists who thought the only way to live was is houses raised up from the earth.

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

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Jenny Uglow on the less lovely aspects of the British character that blossom in the garden

Biographer and historian Jenny Uglow considers the less lovely aspects of the British character that blossom in the garden

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