Great Lives29 Jan 2013

William Robinson

Gardener Carol Klein's great life is a Victorian hero of the wild garden, the writer and horticulturalist William Robinson. Matthew Parris presents, with expert help from Robinson's biographer Richard Bisgrove and reader Stephen Hogan.

William Robinson was a radical and persuasive writer and designer whose influence on British gardens has been compared to that of William Morris on interiors. You may not recognise his name but his influence lives on: 'we are all Robinsonians now, even if we don't know it', according to one recent review. Born in 1838 in Ireland, he started young as a garden boy for the Marquess of Waterford. Little more is known about Robinson's early life, but his rise to prominence was swift once he'd arrived in London. Within a few years he'd been elected as a fellow to the Linnaean Society, sponsored by Charles Darwin and James Veitch. He founded, wrote and published his own gardening periodicals and almanacs as well as writing best-selling books on gardening which struck a chord with the newly wealthy English middle classes who were beginning to build their own gardens in the suburbs around London.

Carol Klein is the garden expert and star of Gardener's World, who started life as an art teacher. Her gardening hobby became a successful career, with a trugful of gold medals from RHS shows and many best selling books on gardening, as well as her own TV series, most recently 'Life in a Cottage Garden'. She shares Robinson's passion and what she calls his 'empathy' for plants, too, making the best of their individual features, whatever they may be.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(414)

Tony Juniper on EO Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson was a pioneer across several fields of biology, from entomology to biodiversity. He is best known for his expertise on ants, his work developing the field of Sociobiology and for...

12 Okt 27min

Russell Kane on Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland in 1919, grew up in London and was educated in Bristol and Oxford. She's famous both as a novelist and a philosopher, and she won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea,...

5 Okt 27min

Ruby Tandoh on Brian Jacques author of the Redwall series

Brian Jacques was a docker, sailor, boxer, trucker, milkman, poet and a folk singer too. Then he wrote his Redwall series of children's fantasy novels and became an overnight forty year success. His b...

28 Sep 27min

Eric Ashby, Silent Watcher of the New Forest

Eric Ashby was a quiet pioneer. He lived in the New Forest in the south of England, where he painstakingly filmed the local wildlife, particularly badgers, foxes and deer. His occasional films were in...

21 Sep 27min

Pauline Black of The Selecter on Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex

Poly Styrene was born Marie Joan Elliot-Said in 1957 and went on to become front woman of X Ray Spex. When Pauline Black first saw her on Top of the Pops, Poly was wearing a red military jacket and ca...

14 Sep 27min

Actor Laurence Olivier with Derek Jacobi and Tim Walker

Laurence Olivier, Baron Olivier of Brighton, was born in Dorking in 1907. He's best known these days for roles in films ranging from Wuthering Heights to Spartacus to the ageing Nazi hunter Ezra Liebe...

14 Aug 27min

Cartoonist Naji al-Ali

Naji al-Ali was one of the best known cartoonists in the Arab world. His creation, a little boy called Handala, always stands with his back to the viewer, hands behind his back, watching whatever Naji...

2 Jun 27min

Cleopatra picked by Kate Williams

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." She's the most famous character in antiquity, made more famous by Shakespeare and Hollywood films. But this Cleopatra is not the one Kat...

1 Jun 27min