Trädgårdsföreningen & Gamla Haga

The forecast for today called for sun all day, with the same for tomorrow. The following day, my last full day in Gothenburg, is currently predicted to have a 100% chance of rain all day. Tomorrow, I have a two-and-a-half-hour activity booked for midday. So this was the perfect day to knock some of the outdoor sights off my list.

I started with a park, Trädgårdsföreningen. And, yes, because of the three diacritics and a name impossibly long for an anglophone with sorely limited recall abilities, such as myself, to remember, I used copy-and-paste everywhere I wrote it here.

Trädgårdsföreningen

One of my guidebooks claims that of Gothenburg’s many parks, Trädgårdsföreningen is in a class by itself.

Of course, being in a class to itself could be a positive or negative description. It might mean that Trädgårdsföreningen is Gothenburg’s only fantastic park or that it has some unique and great characteristics. Or it could be the opposite, a uniquely ugly park and/or with some unique and horrible characteristics. It was the positive one.

Trädgårdsföreningen is a large park beside a canal. My hotel is pretty much just across the canal from the park.

The star attraction of Trädgårdsföreningen, something my guidebooks and walking tour app rave about, is its Palm House (Palmhuset).

It’s a large, tall greenhouse. According to one of my guidebooks, it’s filled with flowering camellias*, giant bamboo, orchids, and palm trees. One section features mangrove trees with twisting roots and a giant water lily with enormous petals. There’s also a Rosarium with more than 1,900 rose varieties.

(*Alright, I admit it. I don’t know about you, but I had to look up “camellias.” According to the dictionary that comes with my Mac, a camellia is “an evergreen eastern Asian shrub related to the tea plant, grown for its showy flowers and shiny leaves.” Now you know. And, two seconds after I’ve looked it up and posted it here, I’ll forget it. So now you may know, but I probably don’t.)

All that being said, I have only my guidebook’s word on that. When I was there, the tall, main section of the Palm House was enclosed in scaffolding and plastic. With the help of Google Translate, I learned from a large sign hung from the scaffolding that the Palm House was being renovated from 2023 to 2026.

The DLJSSIA (Don’t Let Joel See Stuff International Association) strikes again.

According to Google Translate, the sign went on to say that they were working to make sure the Palm House would continue to be available for future generations. Look, I have nothing against future generations. I wish all the very best for them. Seriously. Heck, before I was born, I was part of a future generation. But I’m not fabulously wealthy. I spend a lot of money to travel. When I travel, I want everything to be about me, here and now. I don’t expect it, but I want it.

A couple of the shorter, smaller wings of the Palm House weren’t blocked by scaffolding, and I could see some living plants inside. But entry to the whole Palm House was closed to the public during the renovation.

Despite the closure of the Palm House, my visit to Trädgårdsföreningen was far from a loss. The Palm House may be large, but it’s only a small part of the Trädgårdsföreningen park.

(Google Translate tells me that “Trädgårdsföreningen” translates to “Gardening Association.” Because, of course, it does. Do the Swedes ever meld more than two perfectly good, separate words into a single shmushed-together word? Can you write a complete sentence—subject, object, verb, and perhaps a few adjectives and adverbs—in Swedish without using any spaces?)

Trädgårdsföreningen includes lawns, flowers, bushes, flowering trees and flowering bushes, a fountain, a few sculptures, and a playground. In some areas, those trees are dense enough to form tiny forests. (Tiny for normal forests, but not tiny for a forested area in a not-excessively-large urban park.)

There are also several paths through Trädgårdsföreningen, including one on one side of the park that allows for a stroll beside the canal. It makes for some very lovely sauntering.

Unlike the Palm House, which charges a fee when open, this open-air botanical garden is free to wander about. (Needless to say, the Palm House does not charge a fee when closed. I definitely would have balked at that.)

On my stroll through Trädgårdsföreningen, I came across a sandwich board sign that, through Google Translate, provided some contradictory information to what was printed on the giant sign on The Palm House. It said that the Palm House will be closed for restoration during the spring, but will reopen in the summer of 2025. So, not 2023-2026.

It didn’t say when in the summer it would reopen, but clearly not today, June 15. To be fair, despite the pleasant weather, it’s not yet officially summer. Also, to be fair, DLJSSIA chapters get association prizes anytime they close something while I’m here, no matter how long before and after my visit they stay closed.

Gamla Haga

After leaving Trädgårdsföreningen, I strolled to Gamla Haga. In my various sources, I’ve seen it called both Gamla Haga and just Haga. I’m going to go with Gamla Haga because in my anglophone pronunciation, it almost borders on poetry.

If you speak Swedish or if you’ve been following my posts from Sweden, you know that “gamla” is Swedish for old. (I don’t know if it’s proper usage to call a person gamla, or just the old part of a town. If it does apply to people, then I’m gamla.)

One of my guidebooks says Gamla Haga is one of the last places to experience old Gothenburg.

The walk from Trädgårdsföreningen to Gamla Haga was very pleasant. For the most part, it was through some green space. A one-way road ran down the middle of the green space, but there was a healthy width—enough to be easily called a long park—of grass, trees, and paths on either side of the road.

Gamla Haga is a few streets long and wide. And those streets are in a grid pattern. The surfaces are mostly cobblestone.

The buildings are all low-rise, but the types vary somewhat. There’s one section that’s almost entirely red brick residential buildings with fairly flat, undecorated facades. In another section, there are a few buildings with wood slat facades. I saw one painted stucco facade. And there is one corner building that has a cream-coloured brick facade, with arches over all of the windows, along with some black accent lines perpendicular to the arches.

There is a main shopping street that runs through Gamla Haga. Of course, it’s only for pedestrians. What self-respecting shopping street isn’t? The building with the arches is at one of the intersections on this street. The shopping street is lined along its length with small retail shops, restaurants, and coffee shops.

A map of Gamla Haga affixed to one of the walls along the shopping street showed “Haga Kyrkan” with an icon of a church just off to the side of the neighbourhood. (I already knew that “kyrkan” meant church in Swedish.) I hadn’t seen the church mentioned in any of my guidebooks, but I went over to take a look.

The church is a handsome old building set in a calm little park. I tried a couple of doors. They were both firmly locked. So I don’t know what it looks like inside.

With that, it was time for lunch. I went back to the shopping street in Gamla Haga, found a nice restaurant with tables out on the sidewalk, and had a delicious fish and seafood soup and a glass of wine to end my morning.