United Kingdom-Wales 1
Fountain Garden
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Bodnant Garden is located near Tal-y-Cafn.
The gardens founder, Henry Davis Pochin, was a Leicestershire-born Victorian industrial chemist. 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.
The development of the garden was continued by Henry and Agnes Pochin’s daughter Laura McLaren. Throughout the 1900s the continued development of the garden was a partnership between three generations of the McLaren family.
