Carl Skottsberg spent his career circling the globe, collecting specimens from places most botanists only read about. When Gothenburg decided in 1912 to create a botanical garden, Skottsberg became its first director, a position he held from 1919 to 1948. The garden was no accident of municipal planning. It began with a donation from the Charles Felix Lindberg Foundation, memorializing a Swedish businessman who died in 1909, and opened to the public in 1919 for its woodlands and 1923 for its cultivated areas, timed to coincide with Gothenburg's 300th anniversary. The road outside the main entrance still bears Skottsberg's name: Carl Skottsbergs gata. He filled the garden with treasures from his travels, creating a living encyclopedia of the world's flora in a city better known for shipbuilding and maritime trade.

The topography of the garden is anything but flat. Hilly terrain creates natural boundaries between dramatically different planting schemes, each valley and slope hosting its own botanical world. The rock garden alone contains 5,000 species from multiple continents, internationally recognized for its scope and design. The Michelin Green Guide awarded it two stars. Nearby lies the Japanese Glade, a serene pool of Asian flora assembled in the 1950s by curator Tor Nitzelius, who collected the plants himself from wild habitats in East Asia. In early summer, over 500 species and cultivars of rhododendron transform the garden into a fragrant spectacle. The cultivated portion covers about 40 hectares, but the full 175-hectare property includes the Anggårdsbergen nature reserve, declared protected in 1975, where an arboretum holds scientifically organized copses of exotic trees.

The numbers alone stagger: 16,000 plant species outdoors, 4,000 more in the greenhouses, including Sweden's finest collection of 1,500 orchids. The garden is unique in Sweden for its independence from the city university, operating instead under the Region Vastra Gotaland Regional Council since 1998. Its symbol is the white wood anemone, Anemone nemorosa, which carpets the woodland valleys each spring in sheets of delicate white. The bulb collection draws from plants gathered directly from wild habitats around the world. The kitchen garden demonstrates crop rotation beneath a traditional Swedish syringa arbour. Even the historic buildings tell stories: the yellow-painted Stora Anggården manor house, built in 1812 and now staff residence; the timbered Blue House, originally a boatsman's cottage from 1794 that was moved from Gothenburg's old harbor and rebuilt here in 1919.

Sophora toromiro evolved on Easter Island, shaped by its isolation into a species found nowhere else on Earth. When overgrazing and deforestation eliminated its native habitat, the tree faced extinction. But seeds had traveled. The Gothenburg Botanical Garden cultivated specimens from those seeds, and today the Toromiro survives only in cultivation, thanks in part to the efforts of this Swedish institution. The greenhouses shelter this botanical refugee alongside the orchid collection and a remarkable tufa apartment. It is a strange fate for a Polynesian tree, to owe its continued existence to a garden where winter brings snow and summer never quite feels tropical. Yet here it grows, a living reminder that botanical gardens serve not merely as beautiful diversions but as arks.

In 2003, an international poll voted the Gothenburg Botanical Garden the loveliest park in Sweden, the first time the competition was held in the country. The accolade surprised no one who had walked the paths in spring when anemones bloom, or in summer when rhododendrons perfume the air, or in autumn when the arboretum glows with changing leaves. The garden began as an experiment in biological demonstration and a nature park. A century later, it has become something more: a place where plants extinct in the wild still flower, where a curator's expeditions live on in the specimens he carried home, and where the hilly terrain of western Sweden hosts gardens that could only exist through determined human care.