Grasagarður Botanical Garden

This guide to the Grasagarður Botanical Garden traces its start to August 1961, when Reykjavik marked its hundred seventy-fifth birthday not with monuments but by opening a plot of scrubby land in the Laugardalur valley. It follows the quiet conservation instinct behind that choice, as Iceland's native plant cover had been thinning under sheep and wind for a thousand years, and how roughly three hundred native species now grow along the paths, each labeled in Icelandic and Latin. Listen for the greylag geese overhead, the same birds that likely called out the day this garden was first cut from the turf.