Flâneur Gardening

>I want to tell you a bit about the area where the summer house is situated.

It’s located in a summer house area at the Northern end of Hornsherred, a peninsula nestled between the Isefjord and Roskilde Fjord, an area where human settlement goes back thousands of years.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=55.886095,11.931152&spn=0.385099,0.877533&t=h&z=10&output=embed

The forest near the summer house is littered with a few dozen tombs, dating from the late Stone Age and the Bronze Age, making them anywhere between 3000 and 6000 years old. The landscape is very fertile and gentle, and the fjords would have made transport easy in a time when travel across land was difficult and slow. The Fjord is sheltered with fairly shallow water, so it would also have been a great supply of food.

Thousands of years later the area just South of Roskilde Fjord became one of the most important in Denmark, with a royal residence at Lejre and later at Roskilde, where even today the monarchs are buried in the cathedral.

Around 1800, presumably after the British attack on Copenhagen (Damn that Wellington!), a small fortification was constructed at the North end of the Hornsherred peninsula to preven enemy ships entering Roskilde Fjord, and though the buildings and cannon have long since disappeared, the ramparts remain, as does the military presence in the area due to a large military range just South of the forest.

A bit further South on the peninsula – some 10-15 kilometers from the summer house – lies the palace of Jægerspris. Originally a castle from the 13th-14th century, the oldest remaining buildings now date from 1590, and except for the brief period 1673-1679, the palace has been the property of the royal family up to the end of the absolute monarchy in 1849 when it became state property.

In 1854, however, King Frederik VII bought the palace from the state and used it frequently with his second wife, the commoner who after her royal marriage became known as Countess Danner. Her background and the Copenhagen bourgeoisie’s reaction to their marriage was supposedly one of the reasons the couple spent so much time in this rural retreat, and this means that they are perhaps the historical persons most closely connected to the area. At the King’s death he left the palace to his wife, and she in her turn left the palace with all the estate to a foundation named after her late husband with the primary purpose of running the palace as an orphanage. To this day the palace is still an institution for children in difficult circumstances.

(As an aside: For a few decades the palace also contained an educational institution for educators and child-minders, which is where my mother took her education back in the 1970’s.)

Apart from “history”-history, there are also natural features, like the King’s Oak, possibly one of the oldest living plants in Northern Europe. 1200 years old? 1500 years old? 2000 years old? Nobody really knows… It’s dying now, though, and the two other of the “Three Oaks” have already died within the past 50 years. Still, beat-up and worn as it looks, it goes on living for now. There’s something utterly amazing about that sort of age in a tree, and it’s part of the reason why I love that we have an oak in the garden, even if our oak is only perhaps 50 years old.

The closed lane where the summer house is is actually a fairly new thing. Up to the late 1940’s the area was meadows and pasture lands for a local farm, but with the post-war growth in disposable income in the nation, the local farmer cashed in by dividing his land into plots for summer houses. Kuno, who has had a house up the road since 1958, has told me that when they bought their house there were no large trees between their house and the fjord, and now the area looks as if the plots are carved out between the tall trees.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=flanegarde-21&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0333659171&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrAnyway, this is just to give an impression of one of the reasons why I love the area.