They were idealistic and passionate. And they thought the meaning of life was growing healthy vegetables.
That’s the recollection of horticulturist Lars Krantz, who, in 1984, with his former colleague Pal Borg, started Rosendal, one of the most popular and innovative gardens in Sweden. “Our ambition was to make an interactive educational garden that was primarily a working garden and not a museum,” says Krantz, now 46. The plan was to grow organic produce in a public park in the heart of the city and, through exhibitions and workshops, to introduce an urban audience to the joys of horticulture.
“But more than anything,” Krantz said, “we wanted to create a place that appealed to all the senses, a public garden where people would feel at home and where they could come to have experiences and exchange ideas.”
The soil was as rich as the location. The impetus for the project was the Stockholm Park District’s and the Royal Court’s desire to revive a defunct 19th Century gardener’s school at Djurgarden, a public park island which was formerly the royal hunting ground.
It was not difficult to attract visitors to this centrally located, wooded island, which is the most popular recreation spot in the city. (The Skansen open-air museum, the Grona Lund amusement park, the Wasa Museum and a number of art museums and other attractions are located on Djurgarden.)
Rosendal currently attracts 500,000 visitors annually. The garden grows and sells fresh and preserved vegetables, fruits and berries, herbs, honey and other food products, and the plant nursery cultivates annual and perennial plants for its own exhibitions and for sale to the public.
The garden cafe, one of the biggest draws, serves homemade food, pastry and bread made exclusively from organic ingredients cultivated at Rosendal and other local gardens. An English-language edition of a best-selling cookbook with recipes from Rosendal, “The Garden Cafe at Rosendal” by Monika Ahlberg (Prisma, $40), was published in Sweden in October.
While the Rosendal staff has taught and inspired many Swedes through horticulture workshops and cooking classes, the garden is also known for its creative and contemporary take on horticulture and landscaping. This is a result of a long-standing collaboration between horticulturists, landscape and garden architects, designers and artists, according to Ulf Nordfjell, a Stockholm landscape architect.
The event that definitely put Rosendal on the design and architecture map, he says, was a yearlong exhibition in 1998. The project, which was initiated and directed by Nordfjell, invited a large number of garden and landscaping professionals from Sweden and other countries to create gardens at Rosendal.
The displays showcasing horticulture, craft, architecture and design were “exciting because they made visible the Swedish sensibility and approach to gardening,” he says. “Our way of working is minimalist and inspired by the natural landscape. Our tradition is to simplify, to refrain from doing rather than to decorate.”
To Nordfjell, the contribution of Rosendal to Swedish horticulture and culture in general is its educational mission and, even more important, “the totality of experiences you get there, from the seed to the production of food.” Yet, despite the huge number of visitors to the gardens, the staff has not changed how they work the garden or reduced their harvests.
“This lack of commercialism and the openness–the garden is not fenced in and is free of charge–is probably unique internationally for such a popular garden located in the middle of a city,” Nordfjell says.
Tim Johnson, director of horticulture at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, finds Rosendal unusual for an educational garden. Like Rosendal, the garden where Johnson works is a non-profit foundation aiming to reach a wide audience through exhibitions and interactive educational programs. About 900,000 people visit the Chicago Botanic Garden each year.
“But Rosendal is different because it’s mainly a working produce garden and nursery, yet it’s also an exhibition garden,” he says. “We [at Chicago Botanic Garden] don’t grow produce to use or sell on site, like they do, nor do we grow things for a restaurant.” Another contrast, according to Johnson, is that “we are more formal and more focused on display.”
Director, farmer, tour guide
Nevertheless, the displays are major attractions at Rosendal as well, explains Krantz when he gives a visitor a tour. The garden’s unofficial director since the beginning, he prefers to call himself a “vegetable farmer” and stresses the teamwork and expertise of the 25-person staff.
It’s a late summer day, the roses are in bloom and apples and pears are almost ready for harvest. Floral fragrances mix with the smoky scent from the large wood-burning bread oven located in a building at the back of the garden. While the bread is sold in the garden shop and served in the cafe, the ashes are collected and used to nourish plants and bushes.
As usual, there is a long line outside the garden cafe that serves 1,000 visitors a day. Krantz explains that it was Borg’s idea to convert one of the old greenhouses to a cafe as a way to attract visitors. According to Krantz, Borg, who has since moved on to other projects, contributed a culinary focus that has helped Rosendal reach a wider audience.
In the greenhouse adjacent to the cafe, hobby gardeners are shopping for plants, tools and flower pots, while others stroll along the gravel paths looking at thematic plant exhibitions. Beyond the flower beds is the large orchard, which, at the moment, is filled with picnicking families and playing children.
Grapes and lavender grow in a sunny and sheltered part of the garden near the rim of the deciduous forest. Nicknamed “Little Provence” by the staff, the vineyard was started in 1998 as an experiment. Krantz happily explains that, thanks to a warm summer, this year’s grape harvest promises to be sweet-tasting (seven varieties of hardy Baltic grapes grow here).
An increasingly popular tourist attraction, Rosendal receives many foreign visitors. Among them is Dawn Ng of Portland, Maine, who is vacationing in Stockholm. Ng is surprised by the many ways visitors make use of the grounds.
“I’ve never seen a garden like this. It’s very creative and soothing, especially since it’s so close to the city,” she says.
See and do
The most unusual thing about Rosendal is its interactive quality, Ng says. She has just finished touring “The Garden Patch,” a multipurpose garden display created by Krantz. The site includes a greenhouse, poultry house, patio, lawn and flower beds. Perhaps barring the live hens, an urban resident with a small back yard could emulate the ideas here.
On this afternoon, the wicker chair inside the greenhouse is occupied by a visitor reading the newspaper, while a young girl rests in the hammock suspended between two trees and a boy plays in the treehouse overhead. Meanwhile, two women are having coffee at the table placed on the garden’s brick patio. A hedge and a row of raspberry bushes separate the garden patch from the crowded orchard, giving visitors the sensation of being in their own, private space.
This flow between private and public spaces is something the staff has consciously strived to achieve. “We want the place to be inviting, to give people a sense that the garden belongs to them,” Krantz explains.
The staff also works hard to come up with novel ways to reach the harder-to-grab visitors.
To appeal to a young audience, Rosendal invites art students from Beckman design school in Stockholm to create displays on the grounds. Last season, the students built twig trellises for a thematic annual exhibition which focused on sweet peas. The trellises gave the display a playful Jack-and-the-Beanstalk look.
And then there is the “pick-your-own-bouquet” meadow, one of the garden’s most popular activities. After borrowing a pair of scissors in the greenhouse, visitors may cut their own flowers from the garden’s flower meadow. The finished bouquets are weighed and sold for about $1.80 per 1/4 pound.
The impatient gardener
Krantz, who describes himself as an impatient gardener who gets bored easily, wants to surprise visitors and challenge traditional notions of what a garden should look like. This is put into practice in a flower bed where lettuce, red beet and dill grow next to nasturtium and cosmos. It’s an effective mix of reds and greens, but an unusual combination of species.
The key to his gardening success is being selective and pacing.
When he gives workshops, Krantz cautions beginning gardeners not to be too ambitious, a common impulse which can be a recipe for failure, he says.
“I tell people not to try to do it all at once. It’s better to live in phases and discover what you like,” says Krantz, who has, since this visit, moved on to a new phase in his own life. He has moved to rural Gastrikland province in northern Sweden, to sow the seeds for an international horticultural center.
“Why not have a whole field of one flower in different colors?” he asks rhetorically. “With all the varieties available to gardeners nowadays, the possibilities are endless.”
