The Drottningholm Palace gardens were as impressive to me as the palace. Of course, I’m more of a garden guy myself. We must have walked the gardens for over an hour and we barely touched seeing the gardens. They are a huge area. Of course, back in the day, the gardens including such large areas as hunting parks. It was not all formal gardens.

The first photo is not far into the formal or Baroque garden that is the closest area to the palace. This section of the gardens has a formal and intricate array of plants, grass, hedges, water pools and cascades, sculptures, and more. Some of the closely pruned upright hedges were square and others were round but I was never able to tell exactly why the difference. Our guide did not know either.

Out beyond the Baroque garden, we saw more water features with ten pools and water cascades, somewhat like water falls. Beyond those were multiple sections of hedge groves surrounded by pine hedges. Farther out still were four linden tree-lined avenues. This area was the English garden section. You can see a photo from near the back of the tree-lined avenues in the second photo. The palace looked quite small from there but that was not the back of the gardens. We kept going on from there.

The Chinese Pavilion is a Chinese-inspired royal pavilion which was built in 1763-1770. It is far back in the royal gardens and not in sight of the palace. The Chinese Pavilion is the building on the left in the photo below. The other two buildings are much smaller and are out-buildings. Also, there are many more smaller buildings, plus a kitchen that brought the food to the pavilion via an underground passage. This was an interesting area to visit.

Other sections of the garden were not just not formal, but actually closer to being a cross of parkland and wild lands. This may have been where the hunting was done. These areas had turf areas that was mowed and maintained. But these areas also had groves of trees and lakes that seemed to be left alone. You can see two of these areas in the last two photos. It was very pleasant to walk around these back garden areas.