The University Garden City
Uppsala - 27th June
Uppsala is an hour north of Stockholm and is a 15th century university city. The city of Uppsala has a lot of significant Swedish history, so we went off to discover that history, navigating by their gardens.
The first garden was Linnetradgarden, Sweden’s oldest botanical garden (1655), named after taxonomist Carl Linnaeus. A taxonomist has nothing to do with tax or stuffing animals, Carl Linnaeus was a biologist who invented the system of classifying, categorising and naming organisms, riveting. The above photo was taken through the gate because during the day the gardens are closed to force the public to enter by the museum and pay a large entry fee.
The above pictures were taken from the 1846 iron Jarnbron bridge of the Fyris river.
The water lilies had just begun to flower and along came the council contractor to chop them up and fish out the debris, along with the odd e-scooter.
Shame!
Not a garden, but a building, this is Ofvandahls Hovkonditori, Uppsala’s oldest remaining coffee shop. It was very posh inside, too flash for shorts and jandals, so we just bought a gelato.
This is University Park, which includes 11th century rune stones and a mango gelato. The old University in the background is where Carl Linnaeus went and also Anders Celsius who invented the centigrade temperature scale and named it after himself. It is the university holidays so we had most of the parks to ourselves today.
Partial photo of the garden by Uppsala Cathedral which is dwarfed by Scandinavian’s largest cathedral. Many Kings, Queens and notable scientists rest here and you can visit the crypts, treasury and cathedral for free. For a small donation you can sit and listen to the lunchtime entertainment which was a five piece brass band.
No photo either of the English Park behind the Uppsala University Library (above). The library has an exhibition room displaying ancient maps, rare books and the Carta Marina and Codex Argentus (520 AD)
These photos were taken at the botanical gardens, only the peonies and roses were in bloom, the rest of the garden was being maintained, along with the Orangery.
The photos of the botanical garden were taken from Uppsala’s pink castle, once a royal palace. I imagine the botanical gardens were once part of the palace but now they are separated by a road. The castle is on a hill and can be seen from miles away, along with the cathedral steeples. Uppsala has several more gardens that we didn’t have time to see, but we had to move on.
(Aerial image of Castle courtesy of Wikipedia)
There are 300 burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala from the 6th to the 12th century just 6kms north from Uppsala.
They are Sweden’s second largest mounds; unfortunately due to the 28 degree heat we couldn’t visit them all.
Unlike other mounds we have visited you cannot climb them and they are not maintained as well because they are worried that all the wear and tear will erode them for future generations.
There is a museum and old buildings at Gamla Uppsala, the best views to me were the old church, the stave church next door and the cemetery.
