Great Lives

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 wit