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Start the Week: Nature worship

Nature worship

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Nature worship

Andrew Marr with Sue Stuart-Smith and Jonathan Bate

On Easter Monday, Andrew Marr with Sue Stuart-Smith and Jonathan Bate

On Easter Monday, Andrew Marr talks to the psychiatrist and keen gardener Sue Stuart-Smith on our love for nature. In The Well-Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World, she blends neuroscience, psychoanalysis and real-life stories. She reveals the remarkable effects that gardens and the great outdoors can have on us.

William Wordsworth was the great poet of the British countryside, celebrated for his descriptions of daffodils and the passing of the river above Tintern Abbey. But in a new biography, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World, Sir Jonathan Bate shows how Wordsworth also made nature something challenging and even terrifying. The poet drew on shocking revolutionary ideas from the continent, including pantheistic atheism: the worship of nature.

Producer: Hannah Sander

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