Bodnant Blooming Garden in Snowdonia

Bodnant Garden stands on a dramatic hillside in North Wales,

overlooking the mountains of Snowdonia.

It's a National Trust property, attracting 160,000 visitors a year.

But with annual running costs of £1 million,

and visitor numbers in decline,

Bodnant is working hard to raise its profile.

It's embarking on a £2 million improvement programme,

led by head gardener, Troy Scott Smith.

Bodnant is a world-class garden. It's a garden that's developing.

All gardens do. For me, one of the joys of gardening

is this idea that it's a work of art that's never finished.

Troy has been at Bodnant for two years.

He's well aware of the mammoth task ahead.

Of course, we're not just gardening any back garden, it's an historic garden.

It's 130 acres large,

so you need a large team of gardeners to assist me in achieving my

and the National Trust's and Michael's vision for the garden.

We're fortunate at Bodnant, we have a team of 21 gardeners.

Some with specialisms, such as tree surgery and propagation.

Troy and his team are giving Bodnant a face-lift

across the whole of its 130 acres.

Rising above the River Conwy,

the steep slopes are laid out in two utterly contrasting areas.

The formal terraces...

and the woodland, known as the Dell.

The Dell is home to Dave Larter.

After 12 years as the supervising gardener,

his passion is undiminished.

I'm one of the lucky ones in the world.

When I walk to work, I can take any path I want.

It depends how much time I've got.

If I want to listen to the river, I can listen to the river.

The birds.

Kingfisher flying past.

No traffic.

Beautiful!

Amidst the leafy cover of the Dell, there are hidden treasures to be found.

When I was seven or eight,

we had a lily growing.

Mum's favourite flower.

I remember looking through a plant book -

an A to Z - and finding these.

The book tells you how scented it is.

Said it grew up to four metres, 12 feet,

and I wanted one ever since then.

Then I came to Bodnant...

HE CHUCKLES

..and found these in the Dell.

Cardiocrinum giganteum.

Dave's boyhood enthusiasm has turned into an obsession.

Every year, he gathers seed pods to grow more giant lilies.

It's a labour of love.

A plant for a patient person - seven years or more from seed.

Not easy to germinate.

This year, he has 35 lilies in bloom,

but his ambitions go much further.

I want, before I retire, 500 of these flower spikes in this Dell.

Deputy head gardener, Adam Salvin, has worked at Bodnant for over a decade.

He's responsible for the Italianate terraces that define the formal part of the garden.

Everyone that comes here visits this top half of the garden.

It's where everyone can get to.

It also has a lot of the main features of the garden.

It's a real privilege to work in this area in particular.

There's a major project beginning in one of the terrace areas.

Created 100 years ago, it's known as the Stage,

inspired by an Italian outdoor theatre.

Bodnant's stage has rarely seen any actors but its elegant lines

and symmetrical planting have made it a magnet for visitors.

Like many areas of the garden, the Stage is in need of a makeover,

as the yew hedges have come to the end of their useful life.

Adam and his team

have removed the old yew trees and are preparing to put in new plants.

But there is a serious problem.

These are the new yews we've had for the Stage.

A portion of them have actually got vine weevil.

It is causing this damage to them.

Normally, they would be nice and green and healthy,

but the vine weevil larvae actually start eating the roots,

and it causes the plants to wilt and die like this.

It's a big setback and a costly one too.

350 newly purchased yew trees

are infected with the dreaded vine weevil.

These should be full of roots, these pots.

You can see this little white lava, with the light brown head on it.

They actually gnaw away at the...

roots and also the stem bases.

Half the trees are beyond rescue and must be thrown away.

The remaining trees must be treated with a biological agent

that devours the weevils.

There won't be any planting any time soon.

In the meantime, Adam takes a delivery and gets on with what he can.

Could you bring that other tractor? The turf just arrived.

400 square metres there should be on there.

It's now Adam's job to organise his team

to lay and recreate the perfect lawn of the Stage.

Basically, it's just to put a few of the turfs out where we need them most.

Some of these tricky bits round the edges.

There's four in that first section,

and then the majority of them for this central section.

We'll stack somewhere behind this bench as best we can.

The first turf going down.

One of many today.

Hopefully that should stand up and get a bit of air to it

after it's been in the wagon overnight.

Yeah, be happy when it's all down,

as long as he doesn't make a mess in there, we'll be all right.

Hope he doesn't start scratching it all up.

You can certainly see where you've been.

It makes a big difference having seen this project, nearly seven to eight months now.

Most of the time, we've been looking at bare dirt and soil.

Hopefully, in a couple of days' time, it'll show a bit more life, really.

Within a few weeks, the turf is looking as though it's been there for years.

But with the new yew trees still in quarantine,

the Stage isn't quite ready for its new audience yet.

The revamp of the Stage area is driven by head gardener, Troy,

and also by the family that gave Bodnant to the National Trust.

Michael McLaren and his mother, Anne,

are taking an active role in the whole garden improvement programme.

'It's a little bit unique at Bodnant.

'We still have the donor family here.'

They're very much involved with the garden.

So, really, the day-to-day garden management

is really activated by Michael McLaren,

'discussing with me jobs, tasks, renovations.'

Michael's day job is in London as a barrister.

He visits Bodnant every three weeks to check on progress.

What I said to Tom is that I'll have a look with you today

-and we'll agree a plan of action.

-Sure, let's do that.

'Troy and I have a very good relationship.

'I actually have a direct line with him, so far as the garden is concerned.'

We want to restore, revitalise parts of the garden which are...

a bit over-mature and needing restoration.

'It all works extremely well.'

..Needs to be cut back a bit.

But it's so wonderfully symmetrical. It has an architectural feel to it.

In the Dell, visitors come to admire the hydrangeas in late summer,

but glorious displays like this don't happen by chance.

Eh, up. Here he is.

-Looking forward to this?

-Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

-Looks cold down there.

-Looks very cold, doesn't it?

I'm gonna do a bit of pruning, get the hydrangeas tidied up.

Tidying up the bushes is easier said than done because of the steeply sloping river banks.

Adam and Dave must indulge in a fairly extreme form of pruning.

Hopefully it's...

..still strong enough to...

take my huge weight!

'I love the hydrangeas.

'It's the aesthetics.

'We tidy them up, deadhead them, get the dead wood out.

'Part is of it as well is to keep the vigour,

'get rid of some of the old wood, get that new, nice, vigorous growth coming up. The flowers.'

Never a dull moment here, Bodnant.

Anybody lucky enough to get a job here like me...

..this is the kind of thing we get up to quite often.

It's not just pushing a hoe and pulling a rake.

Yeah, it's good fun, you know?

Bodnant garden is famous for its laburnum arch, which blooms every spring.

A magnificent tunnel of yellow, it attracts 50,000 visitors each May.

There's lots of imitations now, as I call them.

But Bodnant's laburnum arch was, I think, the first. 1880-something.

So this is 130 years old.

An amazing feature at the time to conceive, I think.

With that in mind, we're really conscious we have to preserve it.

What we do is we went through a process last winter of...

All these original metal arches - they look sound here -

but as it went into the ground they were rotten.

You could just push it over, really.

They've all been renewed.

Every year, it takes about five weeks to cut back dead wood

and replace the ties on the arch.

It's time-consuming, but essential for a good show of spring flowers.

After flowering, deadheading is a two-day operation.

Troy is always looking for ways of saving time,

and came up with what he thought was a brilliant idea.

One year, when I first came, I did want to speed it up.

I thought two days was too long.

And I got a mechanical hedge cutter in.

I thought, if you use a hedge cutter, you can go along like that,

and it would all come off very quickly.

It was quick. In 40 minutes, I did it all.

It looked really awful to be honest. So...

I admitted I was wrong and Tony did it again,

and it looked a lot better.

Down in the Dell, some of the magic has been lost in recent years.

The river is cloudy, due to a build-up of silt and shale.

Dave is determined to make this little tributary of the River Conwy crystal-clear again.

We have major water work projects coming up.

The big problem we've got is further down in the mill pond.

Just above the waterfall there.

There's a huge collection of material that's built up over the years.

That needs to go, as does what's in the river here.

If we didn't maintain this,

then the whole river, right through

to where it hits the Conwy, would basically fill up with silt and shale.

To make the dredging easier,

he has decided to build a dam to divert the river.

That will give the team better access to the river-bed.

Right, grab some bags.

We're gonna dam the river tomorrow.

Divert it through that way through the pond,

so that, basically,

we've got free access up and down with machinery here.

Clearing out as much of this...

shale as we can.

Dave is building his dam with large bags,

each filled with a tonne of stones.

The heavy manual work doesn't worry trainee gardener Fiona Braithwaite.

I love it.

At the end of the day, you feel physically tired,

but you feel as though you've achieved something,

and you feel a lot healthier as well after doing it.

Day one went well.

Day two is not getting off to a good start.

Not least because the weather's against them.

There was a mechanical problem this morning. First thing.

That's fixed - we're back in action again now.

But now look at it!

The rain has swollen the river and the volume of water is threatening all of their hard work.

The potential is that the river picks up,

and undoes everything that I am just about to do.

Whatever Dave tries, the river is too much for him.

He just can't hold it back.

The dam won't be built today.

I didn't think it was a good sign.

I was down there and the river was flowing strong.

-Steve said you were almost there. Too much water.

-Yeah.

-Not enough weight in the bags.

-Not enough bags.

-Not enough bags.

A non-gardener, or a non-professional gardener,

you have this image of gardening being deadheading roses

and doing pretty things, but large portions of our work

is dealing with diggers, machinery, drainage work.

Dave and his team have got several weeks work here in the river,

and during that time, there'll not be much gardening happening in the Dell.

Once the water level has dropped,

the dam can be finished and Dave will be able to start dredging.

Alison Clarke's role in the improvement programme at Bodnant is to catalogue and protect the plants.

We have a collection of about 50,000 plants here.

Some of the plants are very, very rare.

Some of them are threatened in the wild.

Some of the material was collected anything up to 100 years ago

by famous plant collectors.

So it's really important that we keep them going.

All we're looking for is a few specimens to make sure

that that plant doesn't go extinct, basically.

So where are we off to?

I thought if we go over and have a look at this big old chestnut tree,

and that is a nice introduction...

Alison is training Fiona in the art of propagation.

Today's lesson is layering - a method gardeners use to create a new plant

by laying a branch of an established plant on the ground where it grows roots.

So all layering is really is exploiting what nature does.

You can see where, with the chestnut, where it's touched the ground,

I mean, that's been rooted in there for years now,

but - and here again, over there -

the branch has gone down low, touched the ground and roots have formed.

Alison uses this layering technique

to propagate many plants around Bodnant garden.

I would quite like to have a go at this one first, this rhododendron.

Bodnant is world-famous for its unique collection of rhododendrons.

With 800 varieties, some of them are very rare indeed.

Ensuring their survival is an enormous challenge.

If anything happened to one of them and I hadn't propagated it,

I would feel quite responsible and a bit guilty, really,

as though it was my fault for letting it die out.

So I'm just gonna scrape away a little of the bark at the base there.

And that does two things.

It makes sure the cambium layer there is going to be in contact with the soil,

and also it causes all the plant hormones to concentrate in that area,

so hopefully rooting will take place there.

I'm just gonna get one of these little pegs.

I think this is probably the only one of this type that we've got in the garden.

In a couple of years' time, the branch will have taken root and become a new plant in its own right.

Once it's properly rooted, you can just sever it here,

dig it out and move it to where you want it, or pot it up.

If we don't preserve it for the future,

I think we'll lose it.

I think the plants here are precious

and the people who do the work, they're invaluable as well.

The improvement programme at Bodnant includes every aspect of the garden,

from planting and propagation to fixtures and furniture.

This is one of our classic seats at Bodnant.

It's a William Kent designed seat.

We have two of them. One on the Stage and one on the Lily Terrace.

You can see, it's well past any use, really.

So we have had two new seats made.

This is the original colour here.

We just felt it was a nice opportunity to actually select... a new colour,

because we weren't really that happy with the original colour.

Actually, lots of visitors this year put on their comment cards,

"Love the garden, but don't like the green on the seats."

The old bench from the Stage has been painted with a selection of possible colours,

but before making a final choice, there's someone Troy must go and see,

someone who is certain to have an opinion.

-Morning.

-Hello, Troy.

-How are you?

-Very well, thanks.

Anne McLaren married the late Lord Aberconway over 50 years ago.

She lives part-time at Bodnant Hall and is devoted to the garden.

You have to tell me what all the latest news is because I've been away.

-It's been a while since we got together.

-That's right, a long time.

I think there's quite a few bits...

Troy wants to know what colour she thinks the bench should be painted.

-I hate coloured seats.

-For me, maintenance-wise, they are a nightmare.

Yes. It's so difficult to get the right colour any way.

-You did a seat just overlooking the canal.

-Yeah.

I didn't like that colour at all.

It was much, much too blue.

Also there's beige, greeny, olivey colours.

That's what I'm for, not duck-egg blue.

-Yeah.

-I don't think you want anything strident at all.

Bodnant is home to many ancient and beautiful trees.

It's vital that any rotten trees are identified and assessed

before they become dangerous.

Adam is a qualified tree surgeon.

Basically, this Abies tree, it's been dying back for quite a while.

As you can see here,

there's quite extensive decay on this buttress here,

there's bark peeling off.

So on here, we've got quite a bit of decay.

If you look up into the crown, there's quite a bit that's died back.

It's been steadily declining over the last few years.

Now we have the chance to actually remove it.

The tree has to be felled.

If left, the rot would spread and cause this ten tonne giant

to fall of its own accord.

So we know it's hopefully OK to climb, it's safe enough to climb,

so what we want to do is climb it, remove it,

before it does extend even further.

OK!

Paul and Adam have 35 years of tree surgery experience between them,

and they know how important safety is when you're working at heights.

If you're 100 foot up a tree, you're on your own.

The only person that's gonna look after you up while you're up there is yourself.

I think he's enjoying it. At least the wind has stayed down a bit.

Spot on!

Very good.

All we need now is to snap it.

Thank you.

While Paul clears the path for a safe landing,

Adam makes one last check to ensure that the tree will fall in the right area

without damaging any other plants.

It has a slight lean to the right-hand side as we're looking at it,

so we'll aim it slightly further to the left,

and then it should end up somewhere in the middle there.

As long as we've got plenty of muscle on the rope, we'll be all right.

Timber!

Even the best-laid plans can go wrong.

The tree veered off course and damaged a conifer.

Just a shame about that.

You saw it moving as it was going down.

-You thought, "Ah, that's gonna go!"

-Yeah, nothing we could do.

The felled tree is completely rotten.

It might have fallen at any moment,

so the main job of the day has been a success,

in spite of the damage to the conifer.

You have to take the rough with the smooth.

If something does happen, it would be unfortunate and unplanned,

but we would have to accept it, cos once it's happened, it's there,

you can't put it back.

Troy is not the only one who's attached to the trees in the garden.

I don't want to see many of my old favourite trees chopped down, because I'm sentimental.

But I realise, you know, everything has a life period,

and you can't keep a tree when it's got...

sort of untidy and old and shabby looking.

Bodnant often sends specimens to other gardens and nurseries around the UK.

These links have proved to be enormously beneficial.

I planted these two trees in memory of my husband.

He always wanted to have a Magnolia here,

and I wanted a very tall straight one. And I managed to find one.

And then this is a Judas tree,

which is supposed to be the tree

that Judas Iscariot hanged himself on after the crucifixion.

We used to have a wonderful Judas tree here many years ago,

and it died,

and I discovered that the Hilliers had had a cutting from my father-in-law,

and had been propagating our Bodnant Judas tree.

I was able to get that for his second tree,

which was very appropriate.

Now that the river in the Dell has been dammed

and is no longer flowing freely, the excavation of the shale is underway.

The process has reached industrial proportions,

and Dave is missing his plants.

It runs through your mind several times that...

I'm only meant to be a gardener,

and can I just go back to mowing my paths

and pruning me shrubs?

It's a lot more straightforward than doing something like this.

It was Dave's idea...

to use this conveyor belt.

Really, it was the best way possible of moving so much tonnage

up a very steep bank, as you can see.

I mean, we're currently moving... We're doing about 18 to 20 trailers a day.

One trailer is about 12 tonnes of material,

so, as you can imagine, we've been doing it a few weeks now.

So it's a fair tonnage we're taking away.

Months of heavy work have really paid off,

and many hundreds of tonnes of material have been removed from the river-bed alone.

The dam has been dismantled, so the water now flows free,

sparkling in the Dell once more.

And Dave has an ingenious use for all this shale.

He's improving the ten miles of paths around the garden.

I'm just tidying up the paths down here a little bit,

they tend to get a bit muddy through the season.

Gave them a bit of a scrape earlier in preparation.

Put some new gravel down - I'm just gonna whack it down now.

Make it all nice and neat.

Up on the terraces,

the Stage is being set for some long-awaited newcomers.

What we're doing now this morning

is finally planting up some of the yew hedges on the Stage,

which we started now almost 12 months ago.

We were hoping to have done it in the spring.

We decided to leave it until the autumn,

and now finally, the day's come

when we're trying to get some of these in,

and make the Stage look like it used to.

35 from the edge and a gap, so...

'I've spent a lot of time now just measuring between each plant,

'making sure the rows are the right distance apart,

'to try and encourage a nice thick uniform hedge with no gaps,

'but allowing the plant some room to expand.'

The paint colour has finally been agreed for the new bench too.

It's called bothy green.

It's taken over a year to improve the decaying stage area

and Troy is delighted with the result.

Now we've got new hedges that will grow and live for 100 years.

And it's a big area of the garden, a significant area of the garden,

which is now complete and we can move on elsewhere.

From the formal terraces to the wild woodland,

Troy and his dedicated team have renewed and refreshed Bodnant.

The hope is that their efforts will be rewarded

with more visitors coming to this beautiful garden in Snowdonia.

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