Garden Open Today: 300 Years of Garden Visiting

Tracing the British love affair with gardens, asking why we love to look at other people's lawns and what this pastime reveals about social class and recreation through the ages. The story starts with sixteenth-century Dutch painter Anthonis van den Wyngaerde, one of the earliest garden tourists, who came to England to draw the gardens of the Tudor Royal Palaces, and then takes in the genteel 'Age of Taste', Victorian pleasure gardens, the opening up of country estates and the National Gardens Scheme.