18 NOVEMBER 2000, Page 63

Beautifying the Baltic

Henry Hobhouse

THE SCANDINAVIAN GARDEN by Karl-Dietrich Bidder Frances Lincoln, £30, pp. 250 I t is lucky that political correctness does not yet apply to the inanimate, or it would be verboten to write about French cuisine or Italian shoes or Danish pastry or what we have here, the Scandinavian Garden.

How valid is the term 'Scandinavia'? Three countries, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, speak languages close enough for their inhabitants to comprehend each other, but two were occupied by the Nazis, while wealthy Sweden remained uninvolved. Conversely, Norway now has oil and natural gas more valuable than Sweden's minerals. Finland, included here, speaks a language wholly non-Nordic and related only to Hungarian, of all tongues. Southern Denmark is physically nearer to the Mediterranean than to the North Cape; western Norway is washed by the Gulf Stream, so the Norwegian north is far less bitter in winter than the same latitude in Sweden or Finland. 'Scandinavia' does not even mean 'once ruled by Vikings' since Finland was not and many ex-Viking coun- tries are not Scandinavian. In the north, Lapps — of every old world Arctic country — ignore frontiers, while their reindeer ignore fences, and have to be persuaded, not driven, away from farmland and gar- dens. They often view non-Lapps with a detached irony while remaining stationary and apparently much amused.

So gardening in the north is difficult; there is a short summer with daylight most of the night around midsummer, while at Christmas nights are more than 20 hours long with only very dim twilight either side of midday, the cold often intense. The way that ancients welcomed the return of true daylight every year after the winter solstice can be easily understood today in the Arc- tic winter.

The south is another story, even if Copenhagen is on the same latitude as Edinburgh, Stockholm and Oslo, nearly 60 degrees north, the same line as the Orkneys. Helsinki is further south but cold- er in winter, warmer in summer, since the eastern Baltic has a climate more continen- tal than seaside, compared to Stockholm or Copenhagen. The nature of these four countries is not at all similar, so the idea of Scandinavia must be derived from the intellect, not geography, like the idea of the United States.

Though these wonderfully illustrated gar- dens are nearly all in the south of Scandi- navia, they have another unity. They embrace water, rocks, trees, lichens and mosses and aim to be much more part of Karen Blixen's house at Rungstedlund in Denmark the landscape than gardens in other Euro- pean countries. Even the more formal, urban spaces have sculpture or wooden animals or exotic trees to make foils for smaller plants. The climate rules that many imported plants are not winter-hardy in these latitudes so that suitable shrubs and the hardiest of herbaceous plants predomi- nate, but there is use of box and other frost-proof evergreens to green the white winters.

Karen Blixen's garden at Rungstedlund features, and it proves that she planted as carefully in her native Denmark as she did in Kenya. It is more than sad to think of this talented woman, ruined in health and pocket respectively by her husband and a world slump in coffee. Here she wrote what would become classics in a house in the middle of a great garden that her father had made many years before and that she had enhanced on her return in the slump year of 1931. Rungstedlund is now in trust and is worth, as Michelin says, a detour.

Another Scandinavian hero, Edvard Grieg, was also a garden-lover, but in west Norway, south of Bergen at Troldhaugen — Hill of the Trolls. Though he suffered from living in this very damp place, trees in particular thrive in a way that would be impossible in the much drier atmosphere of Sweden. But the photographs reveal a som- bre garden that must have suited the com- poser — or did it affect his work?

The German author/photographer start- ed, according to the blurb, as a gardener, becoming, later, a well-known photogra- pher of gardens. One of the pictures most Scandinavian in spirit was taken years ago, of his young blond son, Martin, chasing six geese with a stick in a rough summer meadow. It is a fit overture to many other fine photographs that are more evocative than the text.