On the final morning of the Naturplanteskolen visit to Norway, we visited the Ringve botaniske hage​ in Trondheim. We started with the Renaissance garden, comprising a collection of 123 useful plants mentioned in Norway’s first gardening book, Horticultura, from 1694! We then wandered through the arboretum where mainly coniferous trees are planted geographically around the central pond, representing the Arctic Ocean! We stopped at the pond to talk about one of the world’s most useful plants,known as Supermarket of the Swamps in North America, Bulrush, cattails or dunkjevle! We passed a glade of Mandchurian walnuts (no nuts to be seen this year), then on to a naturalistic planting of Hosta, marvelled at the collection of old perennials, had a quick look at some interesting useful plants in the systematic garden, before finally walking through the “Parken” to the music museum from where we said our goodbyes :(   See the picture galelry at the bottom of this page!

In 2002 I made a renaissance salad containing 80 of the plants in this garden at the opening ceremony. Here’s a document showing what was included, more information and the Middle Age recipe used:

Download (PDF, 329KB)

Finally, here’s a little video showing the bulrush / dunkjevle pollen!