Sex in the garden

BEWARE of women asking: "Can I show you something really sexy?", even if they are a garden historian like Jane Owen. As Tony Robinson discovers, it could make you see childhood memories in a new light.

The Time Team presenter is at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, former home of Sir Francis Dashwood who founded the Hellfire Club, an organisation not noted for its vicar's tea parties.

He's discovering that the gardens have hidden meanings of a sexual nature, as Owen asks him to view the landscape through 18th Century eyes.

There's a dome-shaped folly with a bobble on top - that's a breast and nipple ("quite perky," he observes.) At the bottom of the incline is "a moist little cave with an oval exit" and Robinson begins to get the idea.

Down either side are two pathways representing, Owen explains, Venus's legs. The symbolism finally dawns on him. "So she's sitting in the middle of the garden with her legs apart," he says, like a schoolboy flicking through a copy of Playboy for the first time.

Then his mind drifts back to childhood outings and picnics in the gardens. The family would put down their rugs, collapsible chairs and eat their Dairylea sandwiches outside the cave with Venus's legs wrapped around them. He apologises for coming over "a bit giggly".

This provides a lighter note in an otherwise deadly serious romp in which Robinson shows how 18th Century landscape wasn't a triumph of nature but a triumph of engineering and illusion.

The massive gardens surrounding big houses may look natural but are cunningly designed to make you think that when, in fact, they were created by man. A huge amount of time and money was spent making it look natural.

He went to see how a £750,000 National Trust restoration project at Prior Park, near Bath, is coming along. With much of the garden reclaimed by nature, they're relying on a few illustrations and archaeology to bring it back to how it looked in the 18th Century.

Landowner Ralph Allan was born in a humble cottage, then made a fortune in the newly-founded Post Office and the quarrying of stone. Some of that Bath stone was used in a cascade in the garden. The restoration of this dramatic waterfall tumbling from a lake into a clearing below is the centrepiece of the project.

Allan spent his money on his garden in a way that everybody benefited from. He was, asserts Robinson, the acceptable face of capitalism in the 18th Century.

Friend and poet Alexander Pope helped plan the house and gardens, which were a reaction against formal gardens like those at Hampton Court. The new breed of gardeners turned straight lines into curves, ripped out formal hedges and replaced them with the ha-ha. This was named after the sound made by surprised visitors as they stumbled on this sunken wall.

Then there were grottos, artificial caves encrusted with oddities. Touch, sight, sound and smell are all stimulated by them, says Robinson. "To enter the grotto is to step in a sexual wonderland," he says. I suffer the same effect when I go into an Ann Summers shop.

Just when you think he's not going to get a foreign trip out of the programme, he remembers The Grand Tour that rich 18th Century people undertook. They travelled thousands of miles on trips lasting months. The C4 budget extends no further than a short trip to Rome to see the classic influence.

Hadrian - of Wall fame - had a very nice pad or "the ultimate Roman merchant retreat" to quote our guide. He used his garden as a political metaphor, as a stage on which he could display his power.