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

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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 5: Xenophobia

Factual: Homes & Gardens: Gardens

A Dark History of British Gardening

Episode 5

Episode 5: Xenophobia

Xenophobia

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

Jenny Uglow considers gardeners' 'xenophobia'.

Jenny Uglow wonders at British gardeners' contradictions - seeming to favour 'native species', but also having a voracious appetite for exotic foreign plants.

The writer and historian Jenny Uglow looks at the ways we have mapped 'Britishness' into garden design - even seeing political freedom expressed in the landscape gardens of the 18th century. 

Perhaps none of our national characteristics are played out more obviously in the garden than xenophobia - our mixed and troubled responses to all things foreign. But excessive romantic nationalism associated with the land can take people in the wrong direction, underpinning intolerance and even fascism.

And gardeners' attitudes to 'invasive' foreign plants can be curiously representative of their views of society more generally!

We are not, says Jenny, in a separate moral universe when we are in the garden, it's as well to remember that!

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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