Bodnant… a garden to wonder at

Bodnant Garden

Garden founded by Victorian industrial chemist Henry Davis Pochin

A National Trust property near Tal-y-Cafn in the Conwy Valley, Bodnant Garden was founded in 1874 and developed by five generations of one family before being gifted to the National Trust in 1949.

The garden spans 80 acres of hillside and includes formal Italianate Terraces, informal shrub borders, a gorge garden, a number of noteworthy trees and a waterfall.

Since 2012 new areas to open have included the Winter Garden, Old Park Meadow, Yew Dell and The Far End, a riverside garden.

Visited by around 190,000 people every year, Bodnant is famous for its laburnum arch, which flowers in May and June. At almost 140 years old, it is believed to be the oldest and longest flowering arch in the UK.

Spring is a special time with swathes of golden daffodils filling the Old Park Meadow around Easter time. As daffodils give way to carpets of bluebells in May, visitors can enjoy the spectacle of acres of cherry blossom and the scent of other flowering trees and shrubs throughout the garden; as well as herbaceous beds bursting with tulips, iris, and flowering perennials.

Collections of magnolias and rhododendrons light up the garden with dazzling colour from March to June, many brought to Bodnant by famous plant hunters at the turn of the 1900s.

The garden is especially famous for its Asian rhododendrons, including unique hybrids bred at the garden from the 1920s. It’s said there's a rhododendron in bloom every month of the year at Bodnant, even in winter, but they reach a peak in spring.

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.

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 mainly lawns and pasture.

Beech trees, at the time not a common tree in Wales, along with oak, sycamore and chestnut had been planted around the estate in the 1790s, but Pochin introduced oriental conifers along the banks of the River Hiraethlyn and in Bodnant’s waterside dells these trees thrived, sheltered against the elements and reaching up for light.

Some of the ‘champions’ found here include the 35m giant sequoia planted in 1890 and the Japanese umbrella pine thought to originate from a single plant brought to Britain by Thomas Lobb in 1853, now standing at 20m.

Another wave of tree planting continued in the early 1900s under Pochin’s daughter Laura McLaren and grandson Henry McLaren, who added Asian broad-leaved trees throughout the garden including magnolias, acers and flowering cherries from China and Japan.

Visit the Bodnant Garden website