THE NEW WAY

Snowdonia 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 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.”