You may have noticed I always include a place, like “Värmland”, with my pictures. Sometimes it’s the name of a nature reserve or a specific area, but I always try to include the landskap as well.
These landskap (literally “landscapes”) are Sweden’s old historical provinces. They no longer have any administrative role, but they’re still very much alive in our cultural and geographical identity. We use them to describe places, nature, and even dialects.
Värmland, for example, is both the name of a landskap and a modern administrative region (län), with almost, but not quite, the same borders. The län are made up of municipalities (kommuner), and they don’t always follow the old provincial lines. Some regions combine several landskap, others split them - it's a bit messy.
Most of my photos are from Värmland, where I live, but I regularly visit nature reserves all over Sweden. To give you a better sense of where the pictures are taken, I’ve added a map showing all the Swedish landskap. Even a rough idea of the geography can make the images feel more rooted in place.
Both maps are from Wikimedia and are used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence. Sources: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sverigekarta-Landskap_Text.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden_in_Europe_%28-rivers_-mini_map%29.svg#filelinks
