Floral Artist Tage Andersen's Swedish Fairyland

Walk down one woodland path and you’ll see birch and aspen trees hung with acrylic paintings. Head down another and you’ll discover that what you thought was a huge tree is actually a sculpture “growing” from a block of concrete. So it goes at ethereal, sylvan Gunillaberg, the country estate of Danish floral artist Tage Andersen in Sweden’s rural Småland region. Gunillaberg (@gunillaberg_official) was not Andersen’s first botanically trippy venture—garden nuts have been queuing up to see his Narnia-like floral creations since he opened his Copenhagen store in 1987—but it is by far his most ambitious. Andersen and his husband, Monz, found the seventeenth-century house set on 42 acres in 2008 and transformed it into a summer retreat/quasi-public garden that’s open May through September. “The former owner was almost 100 when he died,” says Monz. “He’d all but ignored the property, which means the estate was a sort of Sleeping Beauty.”

From “Welcome to Fairyland” by Stephen Whitlock for Conde Nast Traveler, 2016; Photo by Felix Odell (@felixodell)

#garden #gunillaberg #copenhagen #sweden #tageandersen #småland #floral #design #artist #art #goat #portrait #story #stories #thestorybar