MAGAZINE
Park Life
Filling a holiday void is no mean feat, but Stephen Gregory has found both solace and inspiration in his local park…
We’re all feeling frustrated by the lockdowns and restrictions
gentleman and gardener we were privileged to know, Mr
and being told to stay at home. We’ve cancelled holidays, or
Ifor Lloyd.
postponed them, maybe once or twice or even three times. For a few years after his retirement as park superintendent, Of course we’re saving money by having ‘staycations’, instead of
our dear Mr Lloyd worked on my wife’s beautiful garden and
jetting off to see the wonders of Macchu Picchu or the Serengeti
its stand of seven magnificent beeches. He worked with the
or Angkor Wat, and we’re saving the planet too instead of
love and care and tireless, unflappable energy which were his
choking the atmosphere with pollution.
special gifts. It was Mr Lloyd who developed the little park on the edge of Caernarfon, in woodland along the banks of the
And here’s another way of looking at it. Two hundred years ago,
river Seiont.
in the first part of the 19th Century, the poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau was writing about the special joy of re-
You won’t find it by chance. You might stumble upon it if you
discovering our closest surroundings, the pleasures of being
take a wrong turn as you’re driving south, out of Caernarfon…
intimate with small spaces close to home.
and if you do, you’ll find yourself in a secret world of gentle
Indeed, living in the woodlands of his native Massachusetts,
loveliness, a legacy of Mr Ifor Lloyd’s gentleness and love.
Thoreau discovered that he could survive perfectly comfortably by working hard for just one day a week… leaving himself the
Ifor himself was a special character. When he wasn’t working,
other six days to contemplate what he called ‘the divinity of
or caring for his beloved wife Nell or his prize-winning dahlias,
Nature’.
he was talking and laughing and bantering with his friends and acquaintances in town. Immaculate in a shirt and tie, in
We’re lucky, here in Caernarfon. Of course we have access to the
a tweed jacket and carefully pressed trousers and polished
nearby beaches and mountains… but there’s a gem of a park a
brogues, he was always in robust good humour. If you find
few hundred yards from our house, where Thoreau would have
yourself in the park which he developed, you can stroll around
been in heaven.
the lake he almost single-handedly dug out and then filled by directing the streams into it from the nearby river – and you
Known simply as Parc y Dre, on Seiont Mill Road, it’s hidden
can marvel at the trees he planted.
beneath busy traffic and the archways of the old railway. And it’s a real wonder, a manifestation of the divinity of Nature.
Now fully mature, some of the older Victorian plantings tower hundreds of feet high. There are cedars and Scots pine, there
Having said that, I should explain that its current design and
are oak and ash, artfully contrasting with the copper beech and
development were largely the work of one man, a truly gentle
horse chestnut and sweet chestnut… yes, artfully, where the
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