Great gardened demesne
DAY OUT: Bodnant Garden, Conwy Victorian industrialist Henry Davis Pochin purchased Bodnant in 1874. The garden remained within the family and today, Iona McLaren, who grew up playing in its grounds, believes it has never look so good
Bodnant Garden, Conwy
Bodnant is one of the wonders of the world. Certainly, there are other gardens with splendid views. There are other gardens that cascade theatrically down sloping ground. There are gardens with magnificent collections of rare plants, there are superb formal gardens, traced out in elegant stone, and there are intoxicating wild ones, threaded with running water. But is there any single garden, apart from Bodnant, that can justly claim to be all these at once?
It is a garden to please a glutton – the sort of person who might order in a restaurant not one dish but five, and greedily hope that each will come as an extra big helping. As Edward Hyams put it in The English Garden (1964): “Once inside this great garden, in which every device of every good school of English gardening has been used, you are inside the English gardener’s dream.”
It is a garden to excite the plantsman, the result of decades spent propagating rarities, sponsoring plant hunters, hybridising and breeding good strains. There are five National Collections here – of magnolias, Embothrium (Chilean fire tree), Eucryphia, Rhododendron forrestii and Bodnant hybrid rhododendrons – as well as around 40 of the British Isles’ Champion Trees (largest specimen of its species).
FAMILY OF GARDENERS
Bodnant is, without doubt, wonderfully designed. This is thanks to the vision of the family who made it, and passed it down from parent to child, starting with the Victorian inventor and industrialist Henry Davis Pochin, who gave it to his daughter Laura McLaren, and she to her son Harry Aberconway. In 1949, Harry gave Bodnant to the National Trust, but kept the running of it, to be succeeded by his son Charles Aberconway, and by his grandson Michael McLaren, who today is the director of the garden on behalf of the National Trust.
The family were superbly assisted by the head gardeners, notably three generations of the Puddle dynasty: Frederick (head gardener 1920–47), his son Charles (1947–82) and his son Martin (1982–2005). And, since then, Troy Scott Smith and John Rippin. Today, a team of 25 full-time gardeners and some 50 volunteers work at Bodnant.
SUMMER INTO FALL
By late summer, the seemingly irrepressible task of tidying is largely over. The meadows are cut, and it is a good time to put on waders and get into the river to weed and prune the banks.
But there is still plenty of colour on offer. Dahlias, Helenium and Rudbeckia bloom in the Range Borders, late-flowering clematis scramble over walls, and roses blush in their terraces. Ornamental grasses – a mainstay of late-summer gardens – sway alongside pastel-coloured lavenders, Salvias, Verbenas and Diascias, and Japanese anemones fill the cracks of the steps. Down in the riverside dells, swathes of blue mophead and lacecap hydrangeas sweep along the riverbank, while ferns are beginning to bronze, set against heaps of dense hostas.
Wander down to the
Glades, where fruit ripens on the trees and bursts of scarlet Crocosmia fill the beds. Crimson hips line the stems of species roses and all the while, offering a backdrop to this display, are the billowing canopies of Bodnant’s glorious tree-filled landscape.
Visitor info: Open all year round, 9.30am–5pm (shorter opening hours in autumn and winter); £16.30 per adult. nationaltrust.org.uk/ bodnant-garden
“IT IS A GARDEN TO PLEASE A GLUTTON”