Built on a promontory at Lake Vänern, Läckö Castle is a baroque confection of whitewashed walls and red-roofed domes and turrets, a vivid contrast to the grey stone fortresses of Northumberland. Within its high walls, its English gardener, Simon Irvine, grows salad crops in sensuous waving curves to show the beauty of vegetables. From the track to the castle I breathe in the strong sweet orange scent of Philadelphus from rounded white clouds of bushes. A yellowhammer calls from deep in a rose thicket, a summer sound among scented arcs of pink flowers.
There’s much wildlife that’s familiar from home. A pied wagtail bobs on the lawn. A magpie rasps from a silver birch. Sparrows keep up a continual chatter in an ash tree or perch on the top bars of a fence painted traditional Falu red. A group of greylag geese are heads-up alert, standing on sloping rocks by the water’s edge, the thin grass stippled with the purple heads of chives.
Many of the wildflowers are our natives too. Biting stonecrop grows in gaps between boulders. Silverweed splays out its downy leaves in decorative patterns. Oxeye daisies sway in a warm breeze and yellow flag irises bloom in the phragmites reedbeds.
I walk along a bleached wooden pier to look back at the naturum, the nature centre where I spent the night, its ribbed design echoing the vertical lines of the reeds around it. From my window I could see a pair of Eurasian cranes across the lake. Every year 25,000 cranes migrate from a winter spent in Spain to central Sweden and Norway, gathering en route at nearby Lake Hornborga. Joining a mass of swans, ducks and geese, they parade on long legs like dancers en pointe, flap their wide wings, leap in the air, twist and turn and trumpet. I watched their jubilant courtship in February, when Hornborga was still partly frozen and snow marbled its banks. Many fly further north but this pair had nested in the reed beds of Vänern.
Now, after 400 years’ absence, the Great Crane Project has reintroduced cranes to the Somerset Levels, where they are breeding successfully in the rich wetland habitat. What seemed exotic to me in Sweden will gradually become less unfamiliar at home.
