Ängsö

Ängsö is the smallest idea among Sweden's 1909 parks — not wilderness at all, but a farmed island in the Norrtälje archipelago set aside to keep the old meadow-and-grove landscape alive: hay meadows, leafy groves, grazed shore pastures, the Sweden of before artificial fertiliser and the plough reaching everywhere. The name means "meadow island", and in early summer it earns it, with cowslips, wood anemones and the two-coloured elder-flowered orchid — Adam och Eva in Swedish — flowering in their thousands.

The island also taught European conservation one of its founding lessons, the hard way. The early park regime treated Ängsö as nature to be left alone, and farming was wound down — whereupon the meadows began to scrub over, because a meadow is not a wild thing but a made one, created and held open by centuries of mowing and grazing. Management was reversed within a few decades, and Ängsö has been mown, grazed and coppiced ever since. The park is now as much a working museum of that labour — scythes in July, cattle on the shore pastures — as a nature reserve.

Above the flowers, the modern archipelago asserts itself: white-tailed eagles, once nearly gone from the Baltic, are now an everyday sight over the sound, and ospreys fish the bays.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no regular ferry; access is by boat taxi or arranged tour from Furusund on the mainland, mostly in the flowering season. Late May and early June are the point of the visit — the orchids and cowslips peak, and guided flower walks run most years. Paths cross the meadows and visitors are asked to keep to them; the hay is the crop that keeps the park what it is. Half a day is enough, and there are no services on the island, so bring everything.

The detail worth savouring: the flowering happens because of the mowing that follows in July, not despite it — come twice, in June and after the slåtter, and you see both halves of the machine.