Uppsala University’s Botanical Garden occupies the former grounds of Uppsala Castle, where a formal Baroque garden now frames living plant collections, research and teaching. Its paths connect royal landscape design, the 1807 transfer of Sweden’s oldest university garden, and the glasshouses that keep plants from around the world in cultivation.
Quick facts
Uppsala University’s botanical collections moved to the former castle garden, donated by Gustav III in 1787, and the new garden opened on 21 May 1807.
Architect Carl Hårleman designed the Baroque garden around 1750; its 1974 restoration replaced overgrown spruces with cuttings propagated from eighteenth-century trees.
A rockery created in one of the garden’s roundels in the 1870s is considered by Uppsala University likely to be Sweden’s oldest preserved rock garden.
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Guide
In Uppsala’s Botanical Garden, the severe geometry of a royal Baroque garden sits beside the changing, practical work of a modern university collection. The site is not the garden Carl Linnaeus directed in the 1740s: that was the older garden east of the Fyris River, now called the Linnaeus Garden. This garden occupies the former grounds of Uppsala Castle and became the university’s new botanical home in the early nineteenth century.
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