North Wales Glorious Gardens from Above

Britain has some of the finest gardens anywhere in the world.

For me, it's about getting in amongst the wonderful plants

that flourish in this country and sharing the passion

of the people who tend them.

However, there is another way to enjoy a garden.

And that's to get up above it.

I love ballooning because you get to see the world below

in a whole new light.

From up here, you get a real sense of how the garden

sits in the landscape, how the terrain and the climate

have shaped it, and I want you to share that experience with me.

Today we're in North Wales, in Snowdonia,

and from up here, it magnifies the grandeur of the landscape.

Wherever I look, the countryside changes.

In one direction, the Wales coastline,

in another, forested hillsides and craggy mountains.

Snowdonia sprawls across the Welsh county of Gwynedd,

at the far north-western reaches of Wales.

Snowdonia covers 800 square miles

and this region is home to some truly inspirational gardens.

And I'm visiting two today. The first is two gardens in one -

a formal upper garden

and its wild lower dell.

And another, once a lookout tower protecting the land approaches

to Conwy Castle, which has evolved over centuries of garden design.

Many reasons to visit a garden -

some of them plants, some of them memories.

A garden is an aide-memoire to life.

This is a spectacular landscape with precious gems like these

studding its valleys.

Snowdonia is an ancient landscape, formed nearly 500 million

years ago, the result of volcanic eruptions and glacial erosion.

Today, it's a dramatic landscape, rocky and damp,

not ideal for gardens. But when you fall in love with a place,

Snowdonia's little foibles won't stop

a determined gardener.

So, first to Bodnant, a national treasure nestled in a national park.

When you're up here in a balloon,

you can get a real sense of what Bodnant's about.

That beautiful house, sitting above the garden.

Those formal terraces bleeding down into that beautiful dell.

I have never ever seen the width of that river. It's magnificent.

Those trees just caress the garden

and unite the garden with the landscape.

And I can't wait to get down there.

Bodnant covers 80 acres of valley

leading down to the River Conway.

It's a tricky site for any garden.

It slopes west towards the river,

with the formal gardens laid out on level ground around the house,

and a cascade of planting which leads to the dell at the bottom.

The stream flowing here winds its way out to the river,

about a mile away.

I've been visiting Bodnant since I was a teenager.

And I remember the first time I came here,

I was blown away by the trees, the shrubs, the names, the history.

I thought I knew something when I left college.

I'd never been to a spectacular valley garden before,

and I came here and that illusion was blown away,

cos there was plants I'd never seen, there was names I'd never seen,

there was compositions I'd never seen.

It was just absolutely amazing.

Once a grand, private estate,

the gardens were bequeathed to the National Trust in 1949.

One of the gardeners is Fiona Braithwaite.

So, Fiona, have you always been a gardener?

No.

When I was a growing up, I used to mow my dad's lawn

and do a bit of weeding,

but it wasn't until later on in life that I began to eat, sleep

and drink gardening. Cos I'd worked for the Department for Work

and Pensions for a number of years, and I decided I needed a change.

At that particular time, Bodnant was taking on their first

National Trust careership trainee, and I thought, "This is it for me."

It was a three year course.

Then I applied for the gardening position here and I couldn't believe

that I'd got it, and I've been here now for nearly seven years.

And what's that like?

What's it mean to you, personally?

Oh, it's like the icing on the cake, you know.

Bodnant Garden is amazing.

Everything combined together gives it a whole festival of plants,

colour, texture for the eyes.

It runs seamlessly from the terraces, which are very formal,

right the way down towards the dell, which is 120 feet down,

got the River Hiraethlyn running through it,

beautiful champion trees, fantastic herbaceous, trees, shrubs, bulbs.

You name it, we've got it.

And that's my favourite part of the garden down there.

Oh, I love it!

It's the people, as well, that you work with and the people that

you see every day and engage with, it is an amazing garden.

And what's more amazing than anything else,

-in my opinion, is that view of Snowdonia.

-Beautiful.

-Shall we go and have a closer look?

-Yeah, let's.

Fiona, just look at that!

Oh, it's an amazing view, isn't it, Christine?

That eternal view is what enticed Henry Pochin to

retire here in 1874.

The Victorians' love of dramatic landscape

was at its peak in the late 19th century,

when Pochin bought Bodnant,

an 80-acre site with a stream running through a deep-sided valley.

Pochin had made his money as an industrial chemist, inventing

the process that turned soap from brown to a more palatable white.

The wealth he amassed allowed him to indulge his passion for plants,

which, together with his imagination, were the ingredients

needed to transform the original house and the modest garden at

Bodnant into a world-class garden, wrested from the crags of Snowdonia.

After only ten years at Bodnant, Pochin died, leaving the garden

to his daughter, Laura.

Along with her husband, the first Lord Aberconway,

she took up the reins.

In 1901, they handed the garden that they'd fallen in love with,

on to their son.

The wealth amassed by Pochin and his son-in-law funded

the Aberconways' plant collecting habit until the Second World War.

So, Fiona, the plant collectors had a big effect on this garden,

-didn't they?

-Very much so.

The second Lord Aberconway, who was Henry Duncan McLaren,

he invested very heavily into the plant collectors in the early 1900s.

These were people that were going out to far-flung places,

such as China, America, Australia

and they were bringing plants back from very dangerous areas

and they would risk their lives to collect seed and plants.

They had to be there at the right time and then, of course,

they had to bring them back by ship. And of course you know

-about the Wardian case?

-Yeah.

Nathaniel Ward, he was the one who invented that,

and so they were able to bring more plants back, still alive.

Nathaniel Ward's invention revolutionised plant collecting.

The Wardian case is a glass contraption, like a mini greenhouse.

It protected living specimens dug up in remote locations

and allowed them to be easily transported home.

It was a gift for the late Victorian plant hunters

sponsored by the Aberconways.

Men like Frank Kingdon-Ward and George Forest were able to

travel the world, returning to Bodnant with their prize specimens.

Kingdon-Ward headed to the Far East,

returning from Tibet with the first viable seed from the meconopsis,

the Himalayan blue poppy, that still grows freely at Bodnant.

George Forest travelled to China and concentrated

his efforts in Yunnan province, amassing a huge collection

of rhododendrons, which he sent back to his benefactor in Wales.

Now one of the country's national collections of rhododendrons

flourishes at Bodnant.

But as many as 600 different species at times came back to Bodnant,

didn't they, through these collectors?

Well, the head gardeners,

which includes the three generations from the Puddle family -

Frederick, Charles and Martin - in one of their diaries,

they actually said they were excited about opening these cardboard boxes

and packaging and crates, for plants that had never been seen before

in this country and they didn't know how these plants would survive.

What we feel with this garden is phenomenal love.

Mutual respect of the owner and the gardener, the plant collector,

the vision, coming together to make

a very, very spectacular collection of plants,

in such a beautiful setting.

As Henry Duncan McLaren used to say,

design means everything. And then, once you've got the design,

you can actually put in the plants later.

Have the skeleton and then put the muscles.

Where else could you get this

and where else would you want to go?

Of all the plants those intrepid explorers brought back,

I love Bodnant's primula collection.

There are 25 foreign species in the collection here,

gathered in Asia all those years ago.

Flowering in Bodnant's famous collection is

the candelabra primula from Sichuan.

Its cerise flowers create swathes of colour in the wilder

areas of the dell and the shrub borders.

It's a welcome splash of colour in the late spring.

It loves semi-shade and rich, moist conditions

and it doesn't mind if the soil tends towards acidic.

Amongst Bodnant's exotics are examples of Britain's

five native primulas.

You'll find good old common primrose

and cowslips growing freely in the less formal areas of the garden.

Every time I turn a corner in this garden,

there's another surprise.

Now this area of the garden has a very different feel to it,

doesn't it? So how was it created?

Well, this area, where we're standing now,

we're actually in front of the Poem Mausoleum, which was built

by Henry Davis Pochin and it's the final resting place of the family.

But what makes it also my favourite area,

is that when I was training as a starter-off gardener,

I was give this huge project to actually renovate this area.

Tackling an unloved patch of garden

so early in her training has stood Fiona in good stead.

Getting your hands dirty and starting from scratch

is the only way to learn how to plant and where to plant.

There's always stories behind a particular tree

or a particular shrub -

where it's come from, where it's going, how it's been planted,

whether the colour, the texture's right for that area,

the conditions of the soil.

You know, here at Bodnant, we have stiff boulder clay overlying

friable shaley rock that's acidic, but when you look around you,

you think, how on earth can we produce

a garden as beautiful as this over the rock that's only about two

or three inches in some areas, below the surface.

You see, the right plant, right place and it works.

But people spend years mucking about with that.

-Yeah.

-Putting the wrong plant in and then it drops dead

and then they say, "Flipping plant."

-They don't say, flipping gardener.

-Yes.

There are exceptions to that rule,

but on the whole, gardeners lose plants every season

while they work out what grows best where.

But there's an easy short cut to avoid a bin full of dead plants.

They should go to gardeners, ask them questions, saying,

"What condition have you got here?"

You know, "What condition do your hellebores like?

"Do they like damp or dry conditions and what type of soil?"

And as gardeners, we love talking.

All the time!

-Shall we do some of these hellebores?

-Yeah, I suppose we should.

And we're just going to deadhead these hellebores.

They've got hellebore leaf spot.

-Yeah.

-So what do you normally do with this stuff

-when you've cut it off?

-We'd have to burn that.

You couldn't compost it, otherwise the spores'd invade into the

compost and you'd get it everywhere, so you've got to burn it.

-And it ruins anything that's diseased.

-Yes.

Now, you see, I've got a little fancy trick with hellebores.

You know that how they seed down really easy on the soil?

-Yes.

-That's not a problem because you just dig them up,

pot them up and then grow them on.

If you take the seed away or you get dried seed,

it'd be a nightmare to germinate.

-Right.

-If you sow it just into pure horticultural sand

and keep that really damp, germinates like mustard and cress.

Oh, lovely.

Further down the valley is Bodnant's damp dell,

the highlight of this garden for me.

I work in the dell with a team.

I think it's got the wow factor, you've got the huge champion trees,

but people don't realise how actually large these trees are.

Some species tower up 100 feet above the dell.

Fiona does sometimes have to go home.

But gardens like this attract their own fan club,

and here there's a large team of gardeners and locals who help out.

We have about 30-35 garden volunteers that come in

about one day a week.

We also have the meeters and greeters,

the people that say hello and direct the cars in the car park.

Again, we couldn't do without them.

I think we work all together, as one big family.

And is there that sense of camaraderie

right from the top, all the way down?

Oh, it's got to be, especially in Bodnant Garden.

That's what makes it so special. And just look around you.

You know, working in this area, working in Bodnant Garden,

who could want for more, really?

It is a very special place.

Someone who can't resist the allure of Bodnant is

green-fingered volunteer Phyllis Davies,

who has a family connection with the garden that goes back generations.

Phyllis's father and grandfather were originally Welshmen.

Her family moved to London for work,

but she returned every summer as a child to Bodnant.

To me, this was sort of paradise, if you like, because

it was all green and we had grass and you had trees and you didn't

get too many of them in the East End of London, especially after the war.

It was a different world.

A different world and a world I actually wanted to be part of.

With Wales running through her veins,

at the age of 20, she left London

and returned to her family homeland, living close to Bodnant

where her grandfather had been one of the estate's first volunteers.

He was a local, retired policeman, naturally at home

asking people to keep off the grass and giving them directions.

I don't think that he would actually have been as

chatty to people as we are.

And maybe they weren't to him, I don't know.

He did have a great regard for Bodnant and I think he'd be

quite chuffed actually, to find that, you know, there was

a member of his family that was keeping the tradition going.

I hope so, anyway.

Once her family had grown up and she retired,

Phyllis decided to continue the family tradition volunteering here.

So what do you actually like about the job?

Meeting people.

And you get their different views on, you know, what they like.

And you say, "Did you have a lovely...?"

"Oh, yes, we've had a wonderful time."

And how many years have you been coming? You know,

cos I've seen you over a few years.

-Oh, this is my sixth year.

-Sixth year.

-Yeah.

Wow, that must be great fun.

Yes, it is great fun.

The 180,000 tourists who visit every year, and the

volunteers who work at Bodnant, all take away a personal memory.

So what does this garden actually mean to you?

It means a lot to me because my grandfather came here,

doing what I'm doing now,

many, many years ago. And so I've grown up coming to the garden.

And although I wasn't born here, I always said that when I was old

enough, I would come and live here, and that's exactly what I've done.

You gain a new understanding of a garden when you work in it

and chat to the visitors.

Phyllis has some lovely tales to tell.

We had one lady who came, who was in a wheelchair,

she was a very elderly lady and we asked her had

she had a lovely time, she said, "Oh, yes." And she said, "When I die,

"which won't be long because I'm 95," she said, "I hope that heaven

will be like this, because..." she said to me,

"..this is Heaven on Earth."

That's what a garden can do to you, it can touch your soul.

The Aberconways left us a wonderful garden to enjoy,

but I often think us ordinary folk should leave our mark, too.

Everyone who's worked hard in a garden like this deserves

a little recognition.

What I really like about this terrace is

the rhythm that's created with these obelisks.

They draw you along. And it's one of your favourite areas, isn't it?

Yes, I love the trellises and I love the urns on the tops.

The rose terraces were carved out of the valley-side in 1905.

They take giant steps down the steep hill with the climbing roses

supported on wooden trellises.

They've been repaired in recent years,

but restoring the urns on top has been too costly.

The Lord Aberconway used to

reside in London, and he used to go to the Ritz Hotel for his tea

or his dinner. And he saw the urns positioned right along the roofline.

And he actually brought the design back to Bodnant and these gardens.

-So he nicked the idea.

-Well, let's just say he borrowed the idea.

Borrowed it permanently.

A new urn with a heavenly inscription

engraved on it could be the perfect tribute to the team at Bodnant,

something that celebrates all the gardeners and volunteers here.

Getting people to enjoy gardens

and the landscape is one of my missions in life.

And what a landscape Snowdonia is.

It attracts four and a quarter-million visitors every year.

And at its heart, lies Wales's highest mountain - Snowdon -

a whopping 3,560 feet.

It's a Site of Special Scientific Interest,

home to unique plants and protected species,

as well as to the famous Snowdon Mountain Railway,

managed by Alan Kendall.

Snowdon has always been a magnet for intrepid visitors.

So prior to a railway, you had a thousand people a day in 1850,

walked up it or travelled by donkey or mule or horse.

So it's always been a Mecca for people out to enjoy the outdoors.

When the railway was opened in 1896,

they also opened a very nice hotel and well-to-do people could

come and put Snowdon on their 1896 bucket list.

Queen Victoria's love affair with Britain's highland wildernesses

had removed the fear-factor from the country's crags.

And with a railway running all the way to the summit,

the well-heeled Victorian as well as the day-tripper could now

enjoy the views from Wales' top mountain.

But in 1890, the railway may never have been started,

if the slate industry had not gone into decline,

forcing the local landowner, Ashton Smith, to diversify.

He reckoned that if a thousand people a day

were prepared to walk up it,

then perhaps even more might pay to ride to the summit.

December, 1894, they cut the first sod on the railway.

Official, you know, had an official ceremony and construction started

straightaway with a completion date scheduled for July, 1895.

It was clear that they weren't going to achieve that

because of the amount of time it took to build the viaducts.

By January, 1896, the thing was complete

and the first train was at Easter.

It could all have ended there.

On the inaugural journey, disaster struck one engine,

which ran out of control on descent.

One passenger died.

Thankfully, that was the last rail accident on the mountain,

and nowadays, 350,000 tourists

safely reach Snowdon's summit on foot and by train every year.

Since the Victorians' first attempts,

only small areas of Snowdonia have been tamed.

But those that are, are spectacular.

Much older than the railway or even Bodnant is

Bodysgallen, another stunning valley garden.

It was originally built 800 years ago as a lookout tower

for Conwy Castle across the Conwy estuary.

But it's now a house and a very spectacular garden,

covering 200 acres.

The gardens here flourish despite the terrain.

Harsh rocks and tricky soil never stopped a Victorian gardener

intent on making a fabulous display.

Bodysgallen is really exciting from the ground,

but from up here, you can see the definition of that parterre

far clearer than you can see it when you're down there and intimate.

It's a garden that excites, both from down there and from up here.

It's a wonderful historic estate, now a smart hotel,

but it's really only the grounds that I've come here for.

I'm dead envious of the head gardener, Robert Owen.

What a cracking job he's got.

Robert, how long have you been associated with this garden?

This is my 34th year.

-So you came as a young man?

-Yeah.

-A little tiny boy.

-Has it changed over the years?

I believe it's better now than it was 30 years ago, yeah.

It's better than when I first saw it,

and I first saw it in about 1979, 1980.

-So you're doing a cracking job.

-Thank you.

Historically, what was the role of the head gardener in that period?

Well, 150 years ago, the head gardener would have been responsible

for putting unusual, early, late fruits and vegetables on the table.

For the honorary guests.

Today, my duties are to please the guests of the house

and make sure that this parterre and other parts of the garden

are up to the standard which are expected in a house of this quality.

-So, in many ways, exactly the same roles.

-Yeah.

The gardens at Bodysgallen had a slow start.

When the Mostyn family inherited the house in the Tudor period,

they turned the estate over to farming and food production.

Like many important houses, it still has its walled kitchen garden.

But what makes Bodysgallen different are the terraces

and the 200-year-old parterre garden they reveal,

laid out with their gravel paths and formal symmetrical planting.

See, to me, this is fascinating because, you know,

there are lots of parterres around the country, but there are very

few with herbs and there's very few that give you this advantage

of standing above them, because you can't get into the house.

You know, so many of them, you've got to go

upstairs in the house to see, but here you've got this lovely

walkway that drifts you through, and you can see it all and enjoy it.

And it's the millions of years of geology underneath

Snowdonia that dictates how gardens like this develop.

This is a prehistoric glacial and volcanic landscape,

where the glaciers dropped their deposits, and

where the volcanic ash floated down, decreeing what type of soil you get.

And you don't have to be far apart to be working in totally

different conditions.

What's fascinating about this garden is that

we're only five miles away from Bodnant,

that's an acid-based garden, this is a limestone-based garden.

So, you know, what else differs to you, as a horticulturalist?

Well, we work round the limestone in the plants that

we've used, but also it's smaller, it's more compact.

It's got little pockets of gardens,

probably more adapted to what was here probably 1900.

If you think of Bodnant, probably 30 gardeners, we've got three.

-Tee-hee. Slight difference, then.

-Yes.

The whole estate here is more than twice

the size of Bodnant, yet Robert

and his colleagues manage all of this with a tenth of the team.

Their job is to preserve, as well as to enhance.

And that's exactly what Robert's done at the bottom of the garden,

a spot visitors rarely reach.

Come on, I want to have a nosy down there.

From the terrace, everything leads downhill

to the vegetable garden and beyond.

It might be a hotel these days,

but the gardens at Bodysgallen Hall still provide the lion's

share of produce for its kitchens and flower vases.

I enjoy this bit of the garden because, you know,

it's all about productivity and this is all used for cutting, isn't it?

Yes, yes.

And presumably, you make lovely arrangements

-up in the house and do all that.

-Yep.

It must have been really great in the old days, you know,

the ladies coming down with their baskets, filling them all up

and taking them up there. And good old day lilies.

The best thing to do with a day lily,

apart from arranging it, is eating it.

Mm!

-Lovely?

-Yeah.

Just short of a little bit of a dressing,

but apart from that, lovely.

Very good.

How do you mange to, you know, do that with your delphiniums?

I'd have big stakes in and I'd have crisscrossing wire.

Well, the florist on Thursday will cut the taller ones out.

-Right.

-But because it's in a walled garden, the winds are not going to...

-So you don't get eddies?

-No, no.

Well, OK. So they just stand there erect and splendid.

Yep. It'd have to be a really bad day to knock them down.

Oh, that's beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Do you enjoy the veggie garden?

Yes, yes, very much so.

The guests love to see home-grown produce going in the house,

for the table.

And you see, it's so beautiful.

But it's the combination of things isn't it,

cos I look at the earth and I see the colour of the soil.

And then your eye's taken up to the house, and it's the same colour.

The detail, it's the lines of the bricks, then picked up with

the lines on the terrace and then you've got the lines

of the hedges, the top of the wall and then the lines of the espaliers.

Very clever.

And the most striking feature is the formal herb parterre.

This is an unusual parterre, planted with herbs,

but here at Bodysgallen, I don't mind that at all!

The deep walls protect the parterre from the coastal

winds of Colwyn Bay,

which means that sun-loving herbs can be grown here most of the year.

The tall fronds of the bronze fennel provide

architectural height among the herb collection.

Bronze fennel is an edible herb, not to be confused

with bulb-forming Florence fennel, which is eaten as a vegetable.

Bronze fennel is all about the aniseed flavour

in its wispy leaves.

Then there's the curry plant.

This is part of the daisy family

and gets its name from the pungent smell of curry drifting up from it,

although it's not what it tastes of.

If you're going to cook with this herb,

use it like you would sage, which is also here.

It wouldn't be a herb garden without it.

This is a Mediterranean herb,

but has put down roots in many cooler climates, and thrives here.

On a hot sunny day like this,

the walled parterre is thick with scents wafting from every corner.

As you descend through the garden rooms at Bodysgallen,

each one takes you nearer to the tree-framed view that brings

back warm memories for me.

I really enjoy bringing tour groups down here,

cos I bring them through the woods and they think,

"What's she up to now?" And we come along here

and all they can see is a green terrace, they don't understand it.

And I come along here and I say,

"Now, why don't you just take a look...at that?"

And all is revealed. Conwy Castle.

And we used to come to Wales,

and my dad every year used to take me to see the smallest house,

and then me mum would buy crab off that guy along the front

and we'd have crab butties. And then we'd have a look at Conwy Castle.

And then we'd wander off up into Snowdonia, and that was our holiday.

But year after year, as little kids, and that's why

I love coming back here and that's why I love that view.

So many reasons to visit a garden -

some of them plants, some of them memories.

A garden is an aide-memoire to life.

I've only got to close my eyes for my personal garden

memories to appear. And at Bodnant,

which according to one visitor is Heaven on Earth,

I'd like to leave a tribute to all the people

who make these memories happen every day.

Replacing one of the weathered rose-trellis urns

would leave a fresh mark in this piece of heaven.

Designer of all things exquisite and wooden,

Andrew John Lloyd has taken up the challenge.

Well, creating this urn has been quite a difficult project.

There are no detailed drawings of this piece available,

so we're having to literally go back to the drawing board

and recreate what the original draughtsman created.

At this stage, things are worked out mathematically to create the jigs

that we're going to have to make to process the making of this urn.

We are using traditional methods to create what is a traditional urn.

So they had to go right back to basics and,

although they're using modern power tools,

the techniques and processes are the same as they were when

Lord Aberconway commissioned all those rose urns half a century ago.

But the materials we're using on this urn are native

to Bodnant Gardens itself.

We're using Douglas fir for the cap,

which has a great durability to weather.

And then, for the main body, we're using oak,

which has a great strength and will give the structure its stability.

Snowdonia has 14 peaks and is rich in wildlife,

but the mountains over there provide the source of raw

materials for the people that live and work there.

Sheep-farming and slate-mining have been

the mainstays of Snowdonia's economy for centuries.

Generation after generation of men would go to

work in the mines, eking out a meagre living.

But when the need for slate went into decline,

the quarries and mines stopped working, and so did the men.

The area suffered a lot of unemployment over the past 60 years.

But community initiatives to help retrain locals are getting

people back into work, as well as helping those that have

wandered away from the straight and narrow.

One such organisation is a garden project run by Tina Hill.

The project is one of the many projects

that are run by a group called Golygfa Gwydyr, which is a local

social enterprise community group, so this is our gardening project.

We have a very formal vegetable garden

and we have potential for a much less formal

but equally important...forest garden.

Tina trains the volunteers in the techniques

needed to run the gardens here,

teaching them everything from basic soil preparation to planting

and harvesting.

The programme aims to give them

the skills to find alternative employment.

We give them opportunities,

we show them what's possible and we'll support them in their choices.

Anthony Sinkinson, a seasonal kitchen worker

in the local hotels, had been unemployed for a while.

With nothing to do all day, he'd got himself into a bit of local bother,

but joining Golygfa Gwydyr has turned his life round.

I started volunteering about five or six months ago.

I was hanging about with the wrong crowd and, you know,

I was doing silly things sometimes and I just wanted to get

away from all that and do something for the community, for myself

and for my daughter and for all of us who are involved in the garden.

It's a scenario that Tina has seen before.

Being a rural area, there's not that much in the way of work.

People want to stay here - they've got a support network here

and it's important for them.

Particularly if you're in that situation where

you're looking for work, it's very easy to get depressed, it's very

easy to get isolated and you need your network of people around you.

Without much large industry left in the area,

employment is seasonal,

based around the ebb and flow of visitors to the area.

You come to rely on tourists and things like that, you know,

cos we are in the middle of nowhere, really, and it's not

like a city, you know, where there are loads of people all the time.

And it's pretty much in the summer, really, where jobs become available.

But then, you know, during the winter, it goes quiet again.

Especially within the cooking industry like working in hotels

and things around here, like.

Anthony's knowledge of fresh vegetables,

learned during his work as a seasonal chef, has paid

dividends when it comes to working at the project's kitchen garden.

When we came here, the place was...

Oh, it was pretty wild, you know, everything was overgrown

and nobody had been here for a good year.

We've just re-dug up all the beds,

we've come in and put new paths down, we've re-done the beds,

put new wood and that down, we've got our own compost bins up

and running, we've got the polytunnel up and going.

We've got tomatoes, peppers, rhubarb, pumpkins.

We've got all sorts going there, yeah.

This place is all about collaboration, team building

and changing life for the better.

That's my kind of gardening.

Since doing this volunteering and that, I've...

I just love it being outside, being in the garden,

learning about the plants

and you know, how they work together and what they do for the environment

and, you know, I've decided now that I want a change of career

and, you know, get a job working in gardens or up in the woods.

It's definitely been a major change in my life,

doing something like this.

It's helped me get away from town and come to somewhere like here and

kind of get me away from people that I was hanging about with and things.

And I've been here a couple of times with my daughter

and my mate's brought his daughter and, you know,

we all get stuck in and just to see the work that we've done now

and everything growing nice-like, is just brilliant, yeah,

and I can't wait for it to grow even more, to be honest,

and start picking what we've grown, like,

and hopefully, you know, sort out the community a bit.

Help the community and...help ourselves.

Henry Pochin and the Aberconways were the wealthy landlords

in North Wales employing large numbers of labourers on the estate.

But a century on, and it's smaller

parcels of land like Golygfa Gwydyr that are providing a way into work.

Here at Bodnant, they now employ one of the project's former volunteers,

who learned skills that he can now develop further

in this grand garden.

Fiona started out with a small patch of land during her

apprenticeship here,

and has worked her way up to become central to the gardening team.

Gardens are hard work.

It's no walk in the park maintaining 80 acres to this standard.

Just look at this rose garden.

It's Phyllis's favourite part of Bodnant

and the perfect spot to celebrate the volunteers' commitment.

For me, this garden's about magic,

because whenever I come here, I wander along the terraces,

and I have to be honest, I tend to rush through there

because it's the magic in the dell that turns me on.

But do you know what also turns me on?

That's your passion.

Now, Andy and his team have made this amazing urn.

And you said to me something earlier

that struck a real chord.

And it was about a visitor. And what does this say in Welsh?

-Nefoedd ar Ddaear.

-Which is?

Heaven on Earth.

You and the volunteers,

every single one of you, make this garden.

-What do you think?

-I think it's absolutely beautiful.

I think it's grand, isn't it?

I think up it can go. Well done!

Well now it's up there, I think

it looks even better than when it was down here.

I think it looks absolutely beautiful.

-So I think it's a toast to Bodnant. Cheers.

-ALL: To Bodnant.

ALL: Cheers!

Hewn from the hillside, wrestled to the ground

and planted so beautifully, Bodnant

and Bodysgallen are Victorian jewels in Snowdonia's crown.

I've visited them both so often I've lost count.

And even now, and every time you come back to this garden,

it's romantic, it's elegant

and there's always something new.

Cos people think they come to a garden once and that's it.

But it isn't.

Every time I come, I know I'm going to leave feeling really happy

and totally in love with the place.