THE NEW WAY Bodnant in North Wales features some of the most stunning landscaping of its era and paved the way for a new model of funding and visiting gardens WORDS IONA McLAREN PHOTOGRAPHS JOE WAINWRIGHT
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nowdonia is one of the wildest and most inhospitable parts of Britain. When you’re amid its rock faces, scree slopes, black lakes and eerie tawny valleys, civilisation can feel very far away. It is, therefore, something of a surreal surprise for climbers to spot, staring back at them from across the River Conwy, a distant cascade of Italianate terraces, conceived on gigantic scale. The gardens at Bodnant, which were given to the National Trust in 1949 and now attract more than a quarter of a million visitors a year, are a theatrical spectacle unrivalled in British horticulture. Even without the garden, the setting is truly jaw-dropping. Down below is a lazy, fat, silver bend of the mighty Conwy, as it broadens into the estuary guarded by Conwy Castle, while beyond that sprouts a blue wall of high mountains in the Snowdonia National Park. Then there is the garden itself – Grade I listed and the creation of many generations of the same family. Ranging over 80 acres, with seven miles of paths, its mood changes from plunging cliffs, churning falls and giant redwoods to dreamy formal canals and balustrades – an exhilarating marriage of classical and gothic. It is an architect’s garden, and a plantsman’s garden, too, home to countless rare specimens and five national collections – of magnolias, embothriums, eucryphias, Rhododendron forrestii and Bodnant hybrid rhododendrons – as well as around 40 of the British Isles’ champion trees. As the garden writer H. Avray Tipping put it in 1920: “Bodnant is a spot where a complete garden education can be received.” So how did it come to be, in this least likely of places? Once there was a white Georgian house at Bodnant, which stared steadfastly across its own Capability Brown-esque parkland, the majestic beeches and oaks of which form the backbone of the garden today. Pointed away at a right angle, the JUNE 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 21
