Gardens In Wales

Wales is loaded with great gardens that are renowned the world over for their amazing beauty and historical significance, but perhaps the most important of them all is the National Botanic Gardens (NBGW), which is close to Llanarthney in the Towy Valley, Carmarthenshire, West Wales.

According to the UK Attraction website, the "National Botanic Garden of Wales is a Millennium project established five years ago, featuring the world’s largest single span greenhouse, an aquacentre and a centre of excellence for botanical sciences based around an historic park landscape set in South Wales. There is a fascinating array of garden features. These include a permanent exhibition on the Physicians of Myddfai, and shows how plants have been used for centuries to treat illnesses and a bog garden featuring a blend of Welsh and exotic water-loving plants."

National Botanic Garden of Wales

And according to the Gardens, the NBGW wants "to develop a viable world-class national botanic garden dedicated to the research and conservation of biodiversity and its sustainable utilisation, to lifelong learning and to the enjoyment of the visitor."

However, NBGW is far from the only lovely garden or garden centre to be found Wales.

In South Wales, the work-in-progress Penlan-Uchaf Farm Gardens, owned by the husband and wife team of the Vaughans, is situated within the centre of the Gwaun Valley include a sensory area for the blind and disabled as well as a raised garden which holds more than 100 different herbs. The setting is well-landscaped and includes a swiftly flowing stream in addition to an abundance of plantings such as alpines, dwarf conifers, and miniature flowering plants.

Also in the southern region of Wales are the four acres of gardens at Glanawen. The Nant Awen stream helps to define this garden which resides at the bottom of a hillside woodlands. Included in the Glanawen are an herb garden, a kitchen garden, a heather, an maple garden, rhododendron walks, and a bog, all threaded together by meandering pathways which at last wind up at a gazebo. At the gazebo one finds a stairwell that wends its way upward to a small gate opening onto a public footpath which in turn, one mile on, comes to the to the National Trust cove at Ceibwr.

And at the Museum of Welsh Life, in Cardiff’s St. Fagans, one discovers planted terraces which guide one to castle and more formal gardens, rising up from the "fishponds" crafted in the mid-1700s. There is also an original and restored Italian Garden dating to the Romantic Era along with one of the finest rosaries to be found in the United Kingdom.

St. Fagans Gardens

Margam Park in Port Talbot includes gardeners’ unique and famous favorites such as the Japanese garden restored from the 1920s, the Georgian Orangerie, and New Tudor and monastic style gardens. Margam Park is also home to Fuchsia Research International and its collection, which is intended to be turned into a hummingbird garden.

In the north of Wales are located the beautiful and intricate Bodrhyddan gardens. Home to the Conwy dating back to the start of the 1400s, Denbighshire’s Bodrhyddan gardens feature the W.A. Nesfield designed formal Victorian parterre that gets replanted every summer, with flowering plants including geraniums and ageratum and comes into fullness in the final week of July, and the former pagan spring-shrine now called St Mary’s Well. Yew paths, ponds, a summerhouse, and a woodlands avenue are also included in the eight-acre gardens.

In Bangor, the traveler comes to Penrhyn Castle and its gorgeous 48-acre garden landscape. With the Menai Straits and Snowdonia’s mountains draped across the background, Penrhyn Castle’s gardens include favourites such as snowdrops, daffodils, and bluebells. In addition, a more formal garden setting includes features like the extremely deftly crafted Fuchsia Arch and wall and bog gardens among forested avenues and carefully chosen tree specimens.

Not far away, at Tal-y-Cafn of Colwyn Bay, Bodnant Gardens is one of Wales’ most celebrated gardens, featuring terraces that themselves include a lilly pond and herbaceous borders among magnolias, rhododendrons, camellias, wooded avenues, and stream pathways. The Bodnant Gardens’ famed laburnham arch goes up for May and June of each year.

Bodnant Gardens

Portmeirion at Penrhyndeudraeth is another magnificent garden experience to be found in North Wales. The planting and cultivation of delicate exotic genera and species here has been made possible by the mild and rarely frosted climate in Gwynedd. The first plantings were made in early Victorian times, with Henry Seymour Westmacott making most of the original exotic plantings back in the 1850s, and these then and now included favorites such as sub-tropical plants, giant yuccas, tree ferns, rhododendrons, and azaleas. The gardens also include well-defined borders and cultivated gardens within the woodlands.

Traveling toward the middle part of Wales, one comes upon the gardens at Glansevern Hall, Berriew, Welshpool, and their central Romantic Era Greek Revival house with its variegated borders and its walled garden’s full roses along with the rock garden and grotto.

Rhododendrons and specimen trees from the Victorian era are found throughout the highly regulated preserve. In addition, there is to be found a substantial lake, an abundantly rich water garden, and woodland avenues that lead all the way to the banks of the Severn.

Glansevern Hall also features a tea room, dogs on lead, and facilitations for those with disabilities.

Not far from Glansevern Hall lies Powis Castle and its 1600s gardens. Hanging terraces which include a French-style Italianate terrace modeled on those at the palace of St Germain-en-Laye in France are included along with wall-climbing castle plants such as roses, pomegranates, and rare specimens amid the rhododendrons and azaleas. Also featured here are the original Orangerie and an Aviary.