If I were asked to suggest a country for a garden tour I probably wouldn’t nominate Norway. The Vikings were impressive mariners but they weren’t gardeners, and not much has changed since their heyday 1200 years ago.
The reason for this is most likely the climate, as Norway’s lengthy winter means for much of the year the country is plunged into almost perpetual inky darkness and covered in snow.
Nonetheless there’s a garden in Norway that makes the country well worth a visit. Ringve Botanical Garden at Trondheim sits at the head of a sheltered fjord 350 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. The 13-hectare gardens were founded in 1973 and surround the Ringve Music Museum on a hill on the edge of the town.
They are one of the prettiest botanical gardens I have ever visited, as although they are attached to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and their primary purpose is botanical study (the accurately labelled plants are part of the university’s scientific collections), Ringve is beautifully landscaped in the style of a large, twentieth century private garden, combining themed formal areas enclosed within clipped hedges with informal woodland and flowery meadows.
By sheer luck everything was in full bloom, as thanks to Trondheim’s extreme northerly location spring comes late and summer is soon over. The first view of the gardens from the street is the large arboretum, a collection of northern hemisphere trees and shrubs planted around a pond representing the Arctic Ocean.
A walk round the pond takes you through the arctic tree lines from northern Europe to Asia and North America. Further out more southerly trees have been planted. From the arboretum the gardens flow up and over the hill opening up into half a dozen different areas.
If you enjoy admiring plants chronologically, start with the Systematic Garden. Here you can walk through rooms surrounded by low hedges, along an evolutionary path starting with ferns, horsetails and other spore producing plants, followed by early seed producing plants including conifers and magnolias, and culminating in flowering plants which evolved the most recently.
A walk round the pond takes you through the arctic tree lines from northern Europe to Asia and North America.
The Old Perennial Garden contains twin borders of traditional herbaceous perennials collected from gardens and abandoned farms in Central Norway, many located on steep sites above fjords that are so inaccessible they are no longer inhabited.
Its purpose is to conserve plant qualities that may be lacking in modern varieties.
The formal Renaissance Garden contains medicinal plants, spices, vegetables, fibre plants and ornamentals dating from the first Norwegian book about gardening, Horticultura (1694).
The design is taken from the book and reflects the renaissance philosophy that humans could master nature.
Finally, below the Museum, on a steep, curving bank with magnificent views down the fjord to the North Sea lies a huge herbal meadow, containing dozens of the wild flowers that we were to see in bloom everywhere we travelled throughout our Scandinavian holiday.
Ringve Botanical Gardens are a local bus ride from central Trondheim. They are open all day and entry is free. The Music Museum contains a café. Phone +47 7359 2269, www.ringve.no/en/