Bodnant Garden

Bodnant Garden ( cy, Gardd Bodnant) is a National Trust property near Tal-y-Cafn, Conwy, Wales, overlooking the Conwy Valley towards the Carneddau mountains.

Founded in 1874 and developed by five generations of one family, it was given to the National Trust in 1949. The garden spans 80 acres of hillside and includes formal Italianate terraces, informal shrub borders stocked with plants from around the world, The Dell, a gorge garden, areas of woodland garden with a number of notable trees and a waterfall. Since 2012, new areas have opened including the Winter garden, Old Park Meadow, Yew Dell and The Far End, a riverside garden. Furnace Wood and Meadow opened in 2017. There are plans to open more new areas, including Heather Hill and Cae Poeth Meadow.

Bodnant Garden was visited by over 260,000 people in 2019 and is famous for its Laburnum arch, the longest in the UK, which flowers in May and June. The garden is also celebrated for its link to the plant hunters of the early 1900s whose expeditions formed the base of the garden's four National Collections of plants – ''Magnolia'', ''Embothrium'', ''Eucryphia'' and '' Rhododendron forrestii''.

History

The garden's founder, Henry Davis Pochin, was a Leicestershire-born Victorian industrial chemist who acquired fame and fortune inventing a process for clarifying rosin used in soap, turning it from the traditional brown to white. He became a successful businessman, mayor and JP.
Pochin bought the Bodnant estate in 1874 and employed Edward Milner, apprentice to Joseph Paxton, to redesign the land around the existing Georgian mansion house, then just lawns and pasture. Together Pochin and Milner relandscaped the hillside and valley, planting American and Asian conifers on the banks of the River Hiraethlyn to create a Pinetum, and reinforcing stream banks to create a woodland and water garden in the valley, in the style of the garden designer of the day William Robinson in his book ''The Wild Garden''. In the upper garden, Pochin and Milner created the Laburnum Arch and glasshouses, to house exotics.

The development of the garden was continued by Henry and Agnes Pochin’s daughter Laura McLaren, Baroness Aberconway, who married Charles McLaren, 1st Baron Aberconway. Laura, like her mother, was a campaigner for women's suffrage and founded the Liberal Women's Suffrage Union. She was also a passionate gardener and inspired her son Henry McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway, to whom she entrusted the care of the garden in 1901. Together they created the Skating Pond at the Far End and began work on the Italianate Terraces. Henry McLaren oversaw the major developments of the garden. He sponsored plant hunting expeditions of the day by explorers such as Ernest Wilson, George Forrest and Frank Kingdon-Ward who brought back plants from China and the Himalayas including magnolias, camellias and rhododendrons. He also invested in a plant breeding programme producing Bodnant hybrid rhododendrons.

From 1905 to 1914 Henry oversaw the completion of the five terraces. This was a massive earth-moving project done by men without machinery, which involved levelling the hillside and building granite buttress walls which provided protection for tender plants being introduced to the garden from overseas. The Pin Mill building on the Canal Terrace was added in 1938. Originally built in 1730 in Gloucestershire, it was rescued from decay by Henry, who dismantled it, brought to Bodnant and rebuilt it brick by brick.

Henry went on to become president of the Royal Horticultural Society for 22 years. He persuaded the National Trust to accept gardens on their own merit and in 1949 he handed over Bodnant Garden to the National Trust, the second garden after Hidcote.

On August 18th 1952 Vita Sackville-West and husband Harold Nicolson were given a day long conducted tour by Henry. Nicolson commented in his diary "the Dell, is the most extensive, most varied and most tasteful piece of planting I have ever seen". He further commented "I have no doubt at all that this is the richest garden I have ever seen. Knowledge and taste are combined with enormous expenditure to render it one of the wonders of the world".

Throughout the 1900s the continued development of the garden was a partnership between three generations of the McLaren family – Henry, Charles and Michael – and three generations of head gardeners Frederick, Charles and Martin Puddle. Like his father, Charles McLaren became president of the RHS in 1961. As was his father and grandmother, he was also awarded the highest accolade of the RHS, the Victoria Medal of Honour. Charles’ sister Dr Anne McLaren

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