Photographs of the Laburnum Arch dominate the pictures used to promote Bodnant Garden, examples of what I’ve called elsewhere ‘Kodachrome Icons’. It’s a convenient simplification of what is an extraordinary, complex place. My diary notes: ‘Spectacular and beautiful, full of what are to me strange and exotic flowers. Sweeping formal beds and lawns; romantic glades and rambling paths; views out to the distant untamed hills.’ Generations of the garden’s creators planted trees from America and Asian and today Bodnant is ‘home to 42 UK Champion Trees – the biggest, rarest and best of their kind’.
Photo: Bodnant Garden, Wales, June 2009