Finding Peace at Home and Away

 We have been on holiday in our favourite part of Wales since last Saturday, and will be driving home tomorrow. It's been a glorious week, yet very relaxing. One of the highlights was visiting Dolgoch Falls, as we do every time we come here, which is an incredibly special space for me. It was the only day we had some rain, but even then it was still beautiful.

We have also spent a gorgeously warm and sunny day in Aberystwyth, which was new for both of us, and visited Bodnant Garden in north Wales yesterday, which was glorious in the sunshine. Although even the overflow car park was nearly full when we arrived, Bodnant is such a large site that we never felt crowded with people except at the refreshment places. It was too late in the year for the laburnum arch and for the rhododendrons and azaleas, but there was still so much beauty to wonder at and glory over. Towards the end of our visit, we came back to the house and the rose gardens, which were in full and luscious bloom. 

All in all, it has been a gorgeous week - we've had a mixture of sunshine and rain, long days out and relaxing days where we stayed local (Barmouth to the south and Harlech to the north) and simply relaxed. I love being here, on Ystumgwern Farm, in our lovely upside down cottage, just being peaceful. I've done some writing, a lot of reading and just enjoyed spending time with my beloved. For me, this is the best kind of holiday. Lots of time to recharge my batteries, and when we go home tomorrow, I will feel relaxed and at peace.

 

Long-Term Hope

It takes a special kind of faith in, and hope for, the future, to start a project that is so long term that only your descendants will see the benefits.

The patrons of the Victorian plant hunters were such people. Last week, I visited Bodnant Gardens in North Wales, which had been established in the late Victorian era, and subsequently tended by five generations of the same family.

There are acres and acres of the Gardens, from formal rose gardens and a delightful golden Laburnum Arch (which we were in perfect time to see) to the Dell, planted in the 1890s and now home to magnificent trees, reaching over a hundred feet into the sky. There are groves of rhododendrons, all the colours of the rainbow - some so bright that they look almost artificial, as though they had been coloured by a child's felt tipped pens, and some so delicate that their beauty took my breath away.

Maintaining these beautiful Gardens is now the job of the National Trust in Wales, and they do a bang-up job. It was a lovely sunny day, and there were a lot of people visiting, but the Gardens were big enough to absorb us all without feeling crowded.

Visiting Bodnant was a very special experience. I gave thanks frequently for the natural, yet human-planned beauty all around me. I marvelled at the faith of that Victorian gentleman, who had a vision for the future, who planted saplings that are now great trees. Some now question the credentials of the Victorian plant hunters, yet I couldn't help being grateful for the opportunity of seeing so many exotic and beautiful shrubs and trees, from all over the world, which otherwise I could never have seen in my lifetime.