Bodnant Garden

Bodnant Garden climbs a hillside above the Conwy valley in North Wales, looking west towards the Carneddau mountains. Covering about 80 acres, it is owned by the National Trust and listed at Grade I, the highest grade, on the Cadw/ICOMOS register of historic parks and gardens in Wales. It was the second garden the Trust accepted for its own sake, after Hidcote, when it was handed over in 1949, and in 2024 it received more than 274,000 visitors.

The story begins in 1874, when Henry Davis Pochin — an industrial chemist who had made his fortune with a process for whitening rosin used in soap, and later an MP — bought the estate. With the designer Edward Milner he reshaped the slopes around the Georgian house and planted North American and Asian conifers along the River Hiraethlyn to create a pinetum in the valley known as the Dell. His daughter Laura, Lady Aberconway, and her son Henry McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway, carried the work on. Henry sponsored the great plant-hunting expeditions of the early twentieth century, by Ernest Wilson, George Forrest and Frank Kingdon-Ward among others, which brought rhododendrons, magnolias and camellias from China and the Himalaya, and he ran a breeding programme that produced the Bodnant rhododendron hybrids. Between 1905 and 1914 five Italianate terraces were cut into the hillside by hand, and in 1938 an eighteenth-century garden building from Gloucestershire, the Pin Mill, was taken down and re-erected on the Canal Terrace.

Those expeditions still shape the garden: it holds National Collections of magnolias, Embothrium, Eucryphia, Rhododendron forrestii and Bodnant's own rhododendron hybrids, and the Dell with its tall conifers, waterfall and stream is the heart of the woodland. Also in the Dell stands The Poem, a small neo-Gothic family mausoleum of 1882. The most famous single feature is the Laburnum Arch, the longest in Britain, which turns into a tunnel of yellow in May and June. Since 2012 several new areas have opened, including a winter garden, Old Park Meadow and a riverside garden at the Far End.

Getting there

Bodnant is near Tal-y-Cafn, about 6 km south of Conwy and around 8 km from Colwyn Bay. The nearest airport is Liverpool John Lennon (LPL), about 64 km away as the crow flies; Manchester (MAN), about 100 km away, is a larger alternative. Llandudno Junction, on the North Wales main line, is about 6 km to the north. Tal-y-Cafn station on the Conwy Valley line is closer, a little over a kilometre away, but the walk from it to the garden is long and uphill, so driving is the simplest option.