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October 1879 Bodnant.

Bodnant Garden, Conwy.

 

Bodnant Garden, Autumn.

 

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’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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Uploaded on October 15, 2017
Taken on October 9, 2017