The Botanical Garden of Copenhagen — Botanisk Have in Danish — has occupied its current 10-hectare plot in the Indre By district since 1874, though the institution itself traces its roots to 1600, when the University of Copenhagen first established a medicinal herb garden near the city centre. The move to the present site, just north of Rosenborg Castle, coincided with a golden era of Danish botanical science: the garden was redesigned with sweeping landscape beds, a rock garden built from boulders collected across Scandinavia, and a network of glasshouses that remain the collection's crown jewels today.
The centrepiece is the Palm House (Palmehuset), completed in 1874 and modelled on the great Victorian glasshouses of Britain, including Kew Gardens' Temperate House. The structure spans roughly 1,000 square metres and rises 16 metres at its central dome, its wrought-iron ribs and hand-fitted panes forming one of the most recognisable silhouettes in Copenhagen. Inside, towering palms, tropical ferns, and cycads — some specimens planted over a century ago — create a dense, humid canopy. The garden celebrated its 150th anniversary on the present site in 2024, marking a decade-and-a-half of recent restoration work on both the glasshouse ironwork and the outdoor collections.
The outdoor grounds reward slow exploration: the systematic beds arrange over 13,000 species by plant family, making the garden as much a working research facility for the University of Copenhagen as a public park. The rock garden, one of the largest in Scandinavia, replicates alpine and sub-arctic habitats and is particularly striking in early spring when saxifrages and primulas bloom across the stone faces. A network of winding paths connects the main glasshouse complex — which includes houses dedicated to succulents, carnivorous plants, and Mediterranean flora — to a tranquil lake at the garden's western edge.
Admission to the outdoor garden is free year-round, while the glasshouses charge a modest entry fee. The garden is open daily, though hours contract in winter. The main entrance on Gothersgade places visitors immediately beside the Palm House, and the rear gate on Øster Farimagsgade offers easy access from the Lakes neighbourhood. Sturdy shoes are recommended for the rock garden's uneven terrain, and weekday mornings in April and May offer the combination of peak spring colour with manageable crowds.
