Frederiksberg Gardens

Frederiksberg Gardens & Søndermarken
Frederiksberg Gardens with Frederiksberg Palace
Type	public park
Location	Frederiksberg, Copenhagen
Area	Frederiksberg Gardens 31,7 hectares Søndermarken 32,3 hectares
Created	1699 (1699)
Operated by	State owned. Slots- og Ejendomsstyrelsen
Open	All year

Frederiksberg Gardens (Danish: Frederiksberg Have) is one of the largest and most attractive greenspaces in Copenhagen, Denmark. Together with the adjacent Søndermarken it forms a green area of 64 hectares at the western edge of Inner Copenhagen. It is a romantic landscape garden designed in the English style.

Frederiksberg Gardens was established by King Frederik IV in connection with the construction of Frederiksberg Palace as his new summer retreat on high grounds atop Valby Hill. Work on the project began in the last half of the 1690s with inspiration from Italy and France which Frederick, at that time still Crown Prince, had visited on several occasions. He commissioned the eminent Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin to draw a proposal and the final plan was subsequently made by Hans Heinrich Scheel, a captain in the Corps of Royal Engineers.

The plan involved a parterre with a complex system of cascades on the sloping terrain in front of the new palace. It was fed by a complicated but inefficient system of pumps which never came to work properly.

In the end, Johan Cornelius Krieger, who was at the time also working on an extension and adaption of Fredensborg Palace, north of Copenhagen, was called upon to redesign the parterre. Unusually of the time, he gave up the parterre completely and instead transformed the slope into a series of terraces.

In the 1790s, as fashion changed, the park was adapted into an English landscape garden. P. Petersen created a new garden plan in 1795. He created a typical English-style landscape garden with winding lawns, lakes, canals and spinneys as well as grottos, temples, pavilions and summerhouses. The final result may well have been based on Johan Ludwig Mansa's book on English-style gardening written in 1798.