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July 1, 2014 · 1 Comment

Visiting Baltic Gardens

Why We Garden

The Dowager Queen looks out over Copenhagen's King's Garden.

The Dowager Queen looks out over Copenhagen’s King’s Garden.

My husband just completed a five month teaching assignment at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. While work and family obligations kept me from joining him, I did manage to visit a couple of times, and we did a lot of travel around Scandinavia and the Baltic. For me, travel often means visiting gardens.

We saw several wonderful Baltic gardens and it will probably take a few posts to digest it all. You can learn a lot about a country and its history and culture by visiting public gardens. Take Copenhagen, for example. Just walking around, it seemed clear that Copenhagen was a vibrant, artsy city with lots of bike traffic and trendy dining (expensive, to0). But it’s also a city that loves its gardens — after all, it is home to Tivoli Gardens, the park that inspired Walt Disney to create Disneyland.

We didn’t make it to Tivoli, but loved walking through two side-by-side garden refuges in the city center. King’s Garden is essentially the front yard to Rosenborg Slot (Rosenborg Castle), the 1606 fortress built by King Christian IV of Denmark. The park is meant for strolling, but it has several elements of interest to gardeners, especially the large formal garden, anchored at one end by the statue of the Dowager Queen Caroline Amalie, who was carrying a bouquet the day we visited.  For someone whose home garden is casual to the extreme, the boxwood hedges, perfectly aligned in a diamond pattern, with lavender and roses inside them, was impressive indeed. Sometimes order is relaxing.

The views are magnificent in the Copenhagen Botanical Garden.

The views are magnificent in the Copenhagen Botanical Garden.

Just across the street from King’s Garden  lies the Copenhagen Botanical Garden. This garden is part of the University of Copenhagen and functions as a research garden as well as a display garden. It also had a cute garden shop, which sold plants. (Unfortunately, you can’t bring those home on a plane!) Inside the garden gates are three museums and an enormous conservatory for tropical plants. The grounds are expansive and include a large rock garden, a pond, a variety of test and display gardens. The paths took you through sunny areas and deep shade and a wide range of soil types. The rock garden was especially impressive and I recognized many of the plants there as ones that would grow in our climate as well.

Below is a gallery of photos from these two Baltic gardens. Do you visit gardens when you travel?

The formal gardens at King’s Garden use boxwood, lavender and roses in a diamond pattern.
This was in the test garden. I could not find the label, but loved the plant.
Rodgersia — a great, big plant for shade, no matter where you garden.

The gardens were originally built to enhance the castle.
Roses were in full bloom in mid-June in the King’s Garden
Ashram rose from Turkey — gorgeous!

View from the top of the rock garden
The large pond at the Copenhagen Botanical Gareden features many water lilies.
The views are magnificent in the Copenhagen Botanical Garden.

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  1. January Light – My Northern Garden says:
    January 22, 2018 at 1:49 pm

    […] I know it could be worse than we have it in Minnesota—my husband worked for several months in Uppsala, Sweden, and when we first got there in late January, the sun rose between 8:30 and 9 a.m. and set by 3:30 […]

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2 cups sugar
1/2 lb butter
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5 eggs 
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cloves 
1 tsp mace
1 tsp cinnamon 
1/2 tsp nutmeg 
1/4 cup or more brandy
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 Cream butter and sugar until light, add eggs one at a time and molasses. Beat well. Sift spices and dry ingredients together. Adds dry ingredients to butter mixture alternating with brandy. Add more brandy if needed. Fold in dry fruit and pour into two regular sized loaf pans (or about 6 small ones). Heat oven to 225 and place a large pan of hot water on bottom shelf. Bake at 225 F (yes, 225) for 2.5 hours. After 2.5 hours, remove water pans, increase heat to 300 and bake another 30 to 40 minutes. It should be firm and a little crispy on the edges. Let cool. Slice and enjoy! 
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Instagram post 2196701309921404156_1447832097 The annual gIfts for gardeners post is on the blog, and one of my favorite new-to-me but ancient-to-the-world garden tools is an olla. I used one in a tomato container this past summer and had the healthiest tomatoes ever. Thanks to @jenniferrensenbrink for telling me about ollas. Of course, I think a membership in @mnhort is a great gift for the gardener who wants ideas rather than things. Link to blog post with full list in bio.
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