Qualla: National Botanic Garden of Wales

National Botanic Garden of Wales: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Broster, CC BY-SA 4.0. When fire took Middleton Hall in 1931, it took everything. The walls were left standing, blackened, with globules of molten lead from the melted roof clinging to them - tiny silver beads where the gutters and the flashings and the cisterns had run down the stonework while everything burned. The mansion had been the masterpiece of Samuel Pepys Cockerell, designed and built between 1793 and 1795 for Sir William Paxton, a man who had bought the estate for £40,000 specifically so he could turn it into a water park. Twenty years after the fire, the walls came down. The land became a place where young farmers tried out their careers. And then in 2000, on the same footprint, the largest single-span glasshouse in the world opened to the public.

Image: Peter Broster | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Botanic Garden of Wales: William Paxton's Water Park

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Hill, CC BY-SA 2.0. Paxton was rich in the way some Georgian gentlemen were rich - large hands, large schemes, money enough to think on the scale of a small landscape. The Middletons had built a mansion at Llanarthney in the early seventeenth century. In 1789 Paxton bought the whole estate. He turne...

Image: Andrew Hill | CC BY-SA 2.0

National Botanic Garden of Wales: The Inheritors

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Paxton died in 1824. The estate by then ran to 2,650 acres. It was sold to Edward Hamlin Adams, a West India merchant born in Jamaica, for £54,700. Adams cared nothing for the water park and let the bath houses fall into disrepair. In 1842 the estate passed to his eccentric son, ...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

National Botanic Garden of Wales: The Glasshouse on the Foundations

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikani, CC BY 3.0. In 1978 some local walkers, picking through the ruined estate, decided to try and revive it. The little fundraising they managed led to the rediscovery of several lost features - the cascades, fragments of Paxton's water network, the line of the great view east toward the folly. ...

Image: Mikani | CC BY 3.0

National Botanic Garden of Wales: Trouble, Survival, the Steady State

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Hill, CC BY-SA 2.0. Charles, Prince of Wales, officially opened the garden on 21 July 2000. By 2003 it was in serious financial trouble - botanical gardens are expensive to run, and visitor income alone rarely covers the bills. In 2004 a rescue package from the Welsh Assembly Government, Carmarthens...

Image: Andrew Hill | CC BY-SA 2.0

National Botanic Garden of Wales: From the Air

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robin Drayton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Fly into the Tywi valley from the south and the glasshouse appears as a low, gleaming ellipse on the slope - a perfect glass dish set into the green of Carmarthenshire. To the south-east, on a steep hilltop about a mile and a half away, the silhouette of Paxton's Tower stands cle...

Image: Robin Drayton | CC BY-SA 2.0