Summer in the Wild - Björk and Berries Travel Guide

How to enjoy the woods and lakes of Sweden

As the Nordic summer arrives, we want to wake the explorer in you. No need to book flights, lose luggage, or stand in airport queues. Only the length of Sweden to travel through our scentscape: 1,572 km north to south, give or take. Set off from Stockholm and cover the same distance into Europe, and you would reach Croatia.

The route runs through rambling forests and spiky pines, along the salty east coast and the old Baltic, up to the great mountain lakes of the north.

You’ll dance under skies washed violet, skinny-dip in cool black lakes, steal a kiss behind a red cottage, and slip through a weathered gate into a shady garden full of spells and mischief.

Lather your skin in a shimmer of birch and sea buckthorn; soothe summer-warm skin with chamomile that keeps your hands soft wherever the road takes you.

And for the restless, undecided traveller, we’ve tucked every scent into little vials and metal-covered travel cases, because it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.

Step into Björk and Berries’ Summer in the Wild.

There’s a point on every country road where the phone signal drops, and with it, something in you unravels, a held breath finally released. One last roundabout, and then the trees close in behind you like a door.

By the time they’ve closed, a peculiar Swedish feeling can settle: a nostalgia (vemod) for the very place you are standing. Blame the darkness of winter, but summer also offers an abundance of the opposite. The longing to go feral, to live every minute of the time ahead.

Fret not, the blazing summer has a second fate. After months of winter darkness, the nocturnal light returns, and something in you goes a little wild, the urge to swim naked, to stay out through the violet night, to live every minute before it’s gone. Wistful and hedonistic at once: that is the Nordic summer, and it is what we set out to bottle.

The forest in summer is calm and grand; it has only just remembered how to be green. Leaves and pine are still soft, turning every shade of chlorophyll. The ground gives a little underfoot, moss, lichen, and the warmth of the soil. The silence isn’t empty so much as full of small, attentive sounds. Stand still long enough, and the forest begins to talk in associations: the old sagas, half-remembered, a woodscape filled with mystery.

Close your eyes, and the forest reaches you through scent and sound before it ever gives you a view, and then the darker register underneath. Scent is the sense that goes straight to memory. It is the mind recognising that it is, briefly, exactly where it wants to be.

Follow the path far enough, and the wind shifts, the treetops dissolve into something brighter just ahead, and there is water through the trees.

As you leave the forest, the air changes. The wind that followed you through the trees softens, then stops. The treetops, solid a moment ago, dissolve into the water, upside down, trembling.

A lake in early summer can be unbearably still. It holds the whole sky on its surface and gives nothing away. You leave your clothes on a warm rock and wade in. There is a particular silence to a lake’s attention, droplets in your hair, moving light and cold under currents that have never quite gone.

To belong completely to a place is also to know you are the kind of creature who can't help but explore, who carries one place into the next. When the light finally goes, late, this far north, the sky keeps a glow of its own, and some of it leaves with you. This is why Björk and berries tell their stories in scent. So whether this summer finds you in the city or on the beach, you can carry the Swedish summer with you, on your skin.

Explore the Summer Collection