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The University Gardens
BERGEN BOTANICAL GARDEN

The alpine garden

In the Alpine garden, you can see mountain plants from different parts of the world. The garden is built to demonstrate different types of bedrocks and different forms of growth.

Primula vialii

Main content

The alpine garden is located in beautiful terrain with natural rock formations. From March / April you will see the very first mountain plants bloom, further into the spring there will be an intense and beautiful flowering in the area. The many paths in Fjellhagen make most of the plant fields accessible.

Different habitats

The plants in the Alpine gardeb grow between rocks and in rock crevices - many thrive best on mineral soil with sand and gravel, others on soil with a higher humus content. We have created many different growing environments, often based on rocks such as lime, tuff, olivine and serpentine, in order to be able to grow plants with different ecological requirements and show how the plants are adapted to special soils.

The waterfall is a mood-creating element in the garden. The waterfall flows into the pond where we see various aquatic plants. Swamp plants grow around the pond that thrive especially well in this humid environment.

Below the pond, along the "main road" into Fjellhagen you will find the cultivated garden plants. Through cultivation and crosses, these plants are better adapted to the environment in the garden than the wild species. This area differs in this way from the rest of the garden, where species mainly grow as they are found in nature.

Geographical division

The garden is arranged geographically according to the part of the world where the plants come from. Mountain plants are found in all parts of the world, and many are adapted to extreme environmental conditions. In alpine areas it is short summers, the plants there are exposed to large variations in temperature, a lot of sun and wind and there are few pollinating insects. The mountain plants are usually small and often pillow-shaped with flowers in clear colors. In winter, the plants are usually protected from extreme temperature and weather conditions by a solid snow cover. We grow mountain plants from all over the world, even Africa and New Zealand are represented in Fjellhagen.

Great species diversity

The collection in Fjellhagen consists of a large diversity of over 800 species. In Fjellhagen, plants from all over the world have been brought in, but we feel a special responsibility for the interesting Norwegian mountain flora. Many of the species in the Norwegian / Nordic area of ​​the garden are collected from the lowlands and from our coastal mountains. We want to secure material from these populations, and the beautiful mountain lady, Saxifraga cotyledon, which was planted during the inauguration of Fjellhagen in 2001, is a good example of this.