RADIO CHOICE

VERY soon, as it has done for hundreds of years, a wave of pink and white will sweep across Japan as the cherry trees come into blossom (pictured). Picnics will be held under the trees, people will walk in wonder under the flowery branches, and tourists will come to see the spectacle. All this week, ‘CHERRY’ INGRAM: THE ENGLISHMAN WHO SAVED JAPAN’S BLOSSOMS (RADIO 4, 9.45AM (FM), 12.30AM) hears how the British horticulturist Collingwood Ingram saved many of these lovely trees from extinction.

THOUSANDS of bodies lie in unmarked graves across Spain. Some of them are in ditches or buried at roadsides, many of them lie in secret mass graves. They are the victims of General Franco, killed during the Spanish Civil War of the Thirties — and for many

years, even looking for these bodies was a criminal offence. In this first of the two-part series SPAIN’S LOST GENERATIONS (RADIO 4, 11AM) Lucas

Laursen joins families searching for loved ones who disappeared and hears about the ‘pact of forgetting’.

FOR this week’s ANALYSIS (RADIO 4,

8.30PM), the documentarymaker Neal Razzell assesses the evidence that a number of species in the natural world are dying off at a rapid rate. He also looks at some of the surprising things that might be done to reverse this worrying process.