Bodnant Garden

Bodnant Garden (Welsh: Gardd Bodnant) is a National Trust property near Tal-y-Cafn, in the county borough of Conwy, Wales, situated overlooking the Conwy Valley towards the Carneddau range of mountains. Founded in 1874 and developed by five generations of one family, it was gifted to the care of 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, and The Dell, a gorge garden, a number of notable 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. Furnace Wood and Meadow was recently opened in April 2017. There are plans to open more new areas, including Heather Hill and Cae Poeth Meadow in the future. Bodnant Garden is visited by around 190,000 people every year 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.

The former name of "Bodnant Gardens" (Welsh: Gerddi Bodnant) is still in fairly common usage.

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. Pochin also built The Poem, the family mausoleum in an area of the Shrub Borders.

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Wikipedia