Sweden’s Secret to Well-Being? Tiny Urban Gardens.

Well|Sweden’s Secret to Well-Being? Tiny Urban Gardens.

On an unseasonably warm June morning in Stockholm, Stina Larsson, 98, stood among fragrant lilacs, lilies and lavender, inspecting the garden that she has tended for more than 40 years. Rabbits had been nibbling the nasturtiums, she noticed, and there were weeds that needed pulling.

Ms. Larsson’s garden, situated on a postage stamp of land beside the Karlbergs Canal, is one of more than 7,000 garden allotments, known as koloniträdgårdar, in Stockholm. The gardens, established as part of a social movement around the turn of the 20th century, offer city dwellers access to green space and a reprieve from crowded urban life.

Though most are modest in size — Ms. Larsson’s garden is about 970 square feet — koloniträdgårdar are prized for providing a rare kind of urban sanctuary, a corner of the city where residents can trade pavement for soil, and the buzz of traffic for birdsong.

The garden programs were specifically designed to improve the mental and physical health of city dwellers, said Fredrik Björk, a lecturer at Malmö University who specializes in environmental history.

“The idea was that a working-class family would be able to spend the summer there and work together but also have some leisure and fun,” Mr. Björk said on the phone from his own koloniträdgård in Ärtholmen, a garden association in Malmö that dates back to the 1940s.