Bodnant Garden Wales
Bodnant Garden in the Conwy Valley in North Wales is one of the finest gardens in Britain, an 80-acre National Trust garden on the slopes above the River Conwy with views across the valley to the peaks of Snowdonia that provides a garden experience of exceptional beauty and horticultural richness across every season of the year. The garden was laid out from 1875 onward by the McLaren family, later Lords Aberconwy, who possessed both the horticultural knowledge and the resources to create a garden of truly ambitious scope, and the result is a place that combines formal Italianate terraces with wild woodland gardens in a seamless and entirely satisfying composition.
The formal terraces near the house, constructed in the early twentieth century by the second Lord Aberconwy, are among the finest pieces of formal garden design in Wales. The series of five terraces descend from the house to the stream below in a progression of architectural garden spaces including the Canal Terrace, the Croquet Terrace, the Rose Terrace and the Italian Terrace, each with its own character and planting scheme and all linked by steps, balustrades and pools in a composition that manages the steep slope with both practicality and elegance.
Bodnant is particularly celebrated for two seasonal spectacles. The laburnum arch, a tunnel approximately fifty metres long formed by trained laburnum trees, flowers in late May and early June in a cascade of yellow that is one of the most photographed garden features in Britain. The rhododendron and camellia plantings in the Dell, the wooded valley below the formal terraces, provide a sequence of flowering from January through June that makes Bodnant worth visiting throughout the spring season.
The Dell itself, a wild garden in a steep wooded valley through which the Hiraethlyn stream runs, contains mature specimen trees of exceptional size and quality and provides a romantic and informal counterpoint to the formal terraces above.