Paradise in Stockholm

My friend Rebecca is here to visit for a couple weeks, which gives me a great reason to dig deeper into the city of Stockholm and check out all the attractions as I'm showing her around. Yesterday was happily warmer than usual and sunny, so we rented bikes and rode to Djurgården, a gorgeous green island dotted with parks, museums and a few lovely homes (including Jonas Bonnier's). This is Stockholm's answer to Central Park, but it's much more quaint and rural-feeling.

We met up in the early afternoon with my friend Jessika, who knows her way around Djurgården quite well, and had a spare bike for Rebecca. I rented one from the City Bike program, which is fantastic. There are bike racks all around Stockholm with a computerized lock activated by members' swipecards. It's a great bargain at around $30 for a card that lasts the whole season (March through October) or $15 for a three day card. The bikes are fat-tire commuter bikes with both handbrakes and pedal brakes (which I found kind of confusing), and they're nicely maintained by the city.

Anyway, it only took about 15 minutes by bike to get through the city traffic and out to Djurgården, and then it was like being in the country. You go through narrow cobblestone streets lined with adorable Victorian homes, past an amusement park and several museums, and then you're on treelined dirt roads surrounded by meadows and forests. We rode around the coast of the island for a while, checking out cool old boats and views of the city skyline, and then we rode to Rosendals Träadgård—my new favorite place in Stockholm. The garden consists of fields of biodynamically grown vegetables and flowers, dotted with graceful Victorian-era buildings and a row of glass greenhouses that have been converted into a cafe, bakery and market (where the crops grown on-site are sold). The aesthetic of the place is elegant, quirky and countryfied at the same time. Picture Victorian buildings in warm yellows and salmons, weeping willow and Russian olive trees, trellises full of flowers, fields of cabbage, chrysanthemums and big purple kale. Then, you've got rusty, whitewashed iron and glass buildings hung with drying bundles of herbs and tables piled with pumpkins and yellow squash, big glass jars full of sourdough starter bubbling in the windowsills around pale-haired ladies selling sandwiches of crusty bread with cheese and greens. Apple pies, lingonberry tarts and hazelnut cookies stacked on pastry racks; people sipping leisurely cups of coffee at cafe tables, their faces toward the sun.... The place was Megan Heaven—I could go on and on.

While there, I bought a gorgeous cookbook that I suspect will be the first of many I'll give as gifts. It's a cook's dream, with recipes for all the garden-fresh goods grown and baked at Rosendals, and a designer's dream, too, with full-bleed photos and hand scrawled recipes printed on lovely matte paper. It's won lots of Swedish awards, but it's available in English at the cafe. I'm looking forward to coming back to Rosendals in the winter when they hold their Christmas Festival. Apparently there's bonfires, amazing sweets, crafts, a live nativity, homemade glögg, etc, etc.

It's also possible to rent the greenhouses for dinners and weddings. They would look amazing with long tables piled with seasonal flowers and vegetables, and candles everywhere. I wish I could just keep getting married over and over again so I could do it in places like this. (I'd marry John every time.)

Here's some photos of Djurgården and Rosendals: