The Linden Alley of Dronningparken

Before Oslo's Royal Palace existed, this stretch of ground was Sommerro, a meadow the mayor Christian Henrik Stoedt turned into a small rococo garden in 1751. When the merchant Bernt Anker took over the property in 1778, he kept the formal garden but planted a linden avenue through the surrounding land he was reshaping into a more naturalistic park, the alley that still opens today toward Henrik Ibsens gate. The Royal Palace itself would not be built for another half-century, going up between 1823 and 1849 around and beside the park Anker had already shaped; when it was finished, his linden alley became part of the grounds of a building that did not exist when the trees were planted. Not everything from that planting survives: when a new entrance to the National Theatre metro station opened in the park's southwest corner in 1998, the oldest lindens in that stretch were removed to make way for it. The alley that remains is Oslo's clearest surviving link to the city's pre-royal, merchant-era parkland, predating the palace it now appears to belong to by nearly half a century.