At about 150 miles (240 km) west of London, Cardiff is a major link on the thoroughfare joining England and Wales. As poets and musicians have explained for ages, Wales seems to pull the song right out of you, to force the poem from your lips, with a beauty and vivacity reflected in its famously kind, hospitable people. Prospective visitors think green when imagining what Wales must be like. And for good reason: vast acreage of private gardens were gifted to the city by former landowners so that Cardiff enjoys an unusually lavish blanket of an almost translucent green.
