Plas Brondanw: A Personal Vision

A Garden of Imagination

Plas Brondanw, tucked away in the foothills of Snowdonia, is the garden created by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis. Best known as the designer of Portmeirion, Williams-Ellis considered Plas Brondanw his real masterpiece. Here he lived, worked, and poured his imagination into the land around his house.

I visited in May, when the rhododendrons and azaleas were in full bloom, their colours blazing against the dark greens of clipped hedges and yews. It is a garden of contrasts: bright flowers set against strong structure, long vistas framed by stone walls and topiary.

Clough Williams-Ellis’s Vision

Williams-Ellis inherited Plas Brondanw in 1908 and spent the next fifty years developing it. He believed passionately in the importance of beauty in everyday life, and in the idea that man-made design could enhance the natural world rather than fight against it.

At Plas Brondanw he demonstrated that philosophy. The garden is not vast, but it feels full of surprises: terraces, avenues, statues, and sudden glimpses of the surrounding mountains. The structure holds the garden together, so that even outside peak flowering season there is a sense of order and rhythm.

Reflection

What I love about Plas Brondanw is that it feels like a personal garden, not a showpiece. It was Williams-Ellis’s laboratory of ideas, and you sense that in the way every path and vista has been thought through. To stand there in May, surrounded by colour, is to step inside his imagination.