DryStoneGarden

Another lovely Swedish hiking trail is on Dyron in the archipelago a little north of Gothenburg. Dyron’s a lovely island and the trail is laid out with a lot of style. Steps and boardwalks and handrails, beautiful views of the water. Rocky crags, ferns, and heather. It’s about 5 km to circumnavigate the entire little island.

This section of boardwalk leads to the waterside sauna, considered one of Sweden’s best and definitely one of the best I’ve ever used. Oddly, the island also has a small herd of introduced Mouflon Sheep living wild on the tiny island. The sauna I expected, the sheep I did not.

And the boardwalks are more extensive than I expected, built and maintained by volunteer retirees who call themself the Blue Men, though, regrettably, they do not dress like the Vegas lounge act. Boardwalks are a resource and labor intensive type of trail — 50 tons of wood provided by the European Union, countless hours of labor by the blue men — and I really appreciate the effort.

A wonderful little island and trail.

I am a total sucker for a boardwalk trail through a bog expanse, so I routed my Sweden trip to pass through the Great Bog National Park. I felt a little self-conscious on my way there, like I should head to Norway’s fjordlands instead of a bog, but I had no regrets once I got there. It’s great, a pocket of laplands in southern Sweden, a wide chartreuse plain beneath a beautiful sky, and I particularly loved the boardwalk trail. Loved it so much I hiked it twice.

There are straight lines in the section of bog near the train tracks, scars from peat mining in the past. Pink Heather grows on the raised seams between the plots where peat was harvested. There’s a long-term restoration project to heal the scars, but long-term is an understatement when you’re talking about peat which regrows at an average rate of 1 mm per year.

Some scraggly pines make it into the area that was heavily harvested.

But the true bog is almost treeless.

The bog has long skinny ridges like sand dunes, with pine and heath growing on them. Science isn’t sure how they formed.

The park has a lake and what feels like more of a wetlands than a bog, and the boardwalk is a luxurious three boards wide. It’s awkward but possible to let people pass.

A lot of Bilberries in the park.

A couple sections of corduroy but the park has lots and lots of boardwalk.

Beautiful boardwalk.

Just after Gothenburg, I rode past Peter Korn’s old garden and checked it out. Peter Korn is a horticulturalist with some garden-world reknown for using thick top-dressings of sand in his plantings. I’d read about him and his sand technique here and here and maybe a couple other places, and I’d listened to a couple of talks on youtube; I like this one he gave for a Beth Chatto Gardens conference, but the others are good too. The sand thing is interesting. I recommend listening to his talk to really learn about it.

The garden I visited is his first garden, the one where he developed his sand technique. He left it some years ago and moved to southern Sweden; it’s now tended by another professional gardener, Max, who was kind enough to let me visit. Maybe I’d have have done better to visit the garden during its heyday or maybe I’d do better to visit the new garden, but I liked seeing this one in its post-creator phase. It’s nicely maintained by Max with a bit of a loose grip, a lovely expansive space, fun to explore, charming.

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In Sweden I also visited the Gothenburg Botanic Garden. Another great garden, it’s the best thing in Gothenburg, and one of the best botanic gardens in Europe. It has a number of nice sections, most are naturalistic, it’s rocky and hilly, and does a great job incorporating the plants with the terrain. Read the rest of this entry »

In Europe I saw a new Piet Oudolf garden. It’s at a newish design museum, Vandalorum, outside a small town in Sweden. It’s great. The garden is pretty much the showcase of the museum — I only know about the museum because of it — and it was unquestionably the highlight for me. ‘Artistic museum planting’ has become quite a niche for Oudolf, he must have done close to a dozen at this point, and I don’t know of any other landscape designer or architect who has done anything like that. I’ve seen a half dozen gardens by him at this point and they’re always worth the effort to see. Really glad my route took me past this one.

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I rode a bicycle in Scandinavia again this summer, a mostly coastal loop around the sea. Starting in Denmark, I rode up the east coast of Jutland, ferried to Norway and rode a section of the southern coast, then took another ferry and rode through Sweden to get back to Copenhagen. It was all really nice. I rode a lot of separated bike paths, ate a lot of salmon and rye bread, and camped in a lot of lovely spots. I swam from rocks, docks, and platforms. I saw a lot of wheat fields and a surprising amount of California native Phacelia blooming as a cover crop. I picked a gluttonous amount of bilberries. These are my sketches. I brought along watercolors this year instead of colored pencils.

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