Knutshø and Kongsvoll

On 15th July 2016, I and my daughter Hazel met a group of Danes , travelling to the weekend course on perennial vegetables at my place in Malvik.  We were at Kongsvoll Fjellstue for a one day botanical excursion on one of Northern Europe’s best known botanical mountains, Knutshøa. Kongsvoll is a 2.5 hour drive south from my house on the Trondheimsfjord. Several of the participants stayed the night in the beautiful mountain hotel (Kongsvoll Fjellstue) located right next to the main road between Oslo and Trondheim and there’s also a railway station here. It’s easy access and the amazing diversity of species on the mountain (over 400) lead to the popularity of this mountain to both professional and amateur botanists following the discovery of the richness of the flora in this area by Georg Christian Oeder (who was working on Flora Danica over 250 years ago!). Because of potential overcollection here, over 50 plants were protected here as early as 1911! Another Danish connection is Norwegian female botanist Thekla Resvoll (1871-1948) who was inspired as a student in Copenhagen under Eugenius Warming, a specialist on the Arctic Flora and the reationship between plants and their environment, a subject that Resvoll studied on the upper slopes of Knutshøa. She should also be known amongst arctic fruit growers as she did the original studies on the cloudberry (molte) (1925-29). She also established a small botanical garden at the Kongsvoll railway station which I remember visiting several times in the 1980s. A new much bigger garden was established next to the hotel and research station in 1992 and we spent some time familiarising ourselves with some of the plants before walking onto the mountain. We were lucky enough to meet the manager of the garden, Tommy Prestø, who kindly gave us a brief introduction to the garden. Unusual for botanical gardens, it emphasises the natural flora in-situ and rather than planting, plant labels are mostly moved around in the garden as plants die and appear somewhere else. The garden is however managed for the plants to stop scrub invading etc.

The pictures here show a selection of plants we saw on our 6 hour walk of the mountain….we didn’t quite manage to get to the top which is at 1690m (Kongsvoll is at 900m):  http://www.edimentals.com/pictures/index.php?/category/113

 See more at https://www.ntnu.edu/museum/kongsvoll-alpine-garden
A species list for the garden:
https://www.ntnu.no/documents/10476/1264111727/Artsliste+Kongsvoll+fjellhage+2005-2011+english.pdf/565c7b54-ed41-4bc1-8486-5c29aed1e269?version=1.0

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Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden