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Fifteen minutes east at Llanarthne, the National Botanic Garden spreads across 568 acres of old parkland. Aberglasney is another ten minutes on, and its raised stone walkways are the last Elizabethan garden of their kind in Britain.

Llandeilo is at the far end, up on a hill with the river below it. Beyond it the land climbs to the Black Mountain, and the lanes get narrow and empty very quickly.

Fifteen minutes east of Carmarthen there is a garden that exists for two odd reasons. A banker spent a fortune trying to win a seat in Parliament and never recovered from it, and his house burned down a century later.

William Paxton made his money in India and came home to buy the Middleton estate at Llanarthne in 1789. He pulled down what was there and had a new mansion built, and then he turned his attention to the ground around it.

What he made was one of the finest Regency landscapes in Wales. Chains of lakes ran into one another down the valley, fed by dams, cascades and a waterfall. The lakes fed the house itself, through a system of pipes running uphill.

Middleton Hall burned down in 1931 and was never rebuilt. The lakes silted, the dams gave way, and the whole 568-acre park went back to farmland. The National Botanic Garden of Wales opened on the site in 2000, sixty-nine years after the fire.

The Great Glasshouse is what everybody comes for, and you can see why from the car park. It is the largest single-span glasshouse in the world, and it sits low in the hillside like a dropped lens. Inside are plants from South Africa, Australia, Chile, California and the Mediterranean itself.

The Regency lakes have been dug out and refilled, and you can walk the whole chain of them. A British bird of prey centre in the grounds flies its birds every day through the season. The walled garden and the tropical house are worth an hour on their own.

Aberglasney is ten minutes further up the valley and it is the quieter of the two. Its cloister garden, a square of raised stone walkways you can walk along the top of, is the only Elizabethan one left in Britain, and there are ten acres behind it.

The rest of the valley runs on to Llandeilo through flat green farmland, and you can still stop at the castle ruins above the river at Dryslwyn. The lanes off it are narrow and empty, and Carmarthen is never more than twenty minutes back.