Get off the metro at Tøyen and the first thing you see is a shopping centre, a square and a lot of people going about ordinary business. It does not look like the start of anything old.
Walk two minutes north, though, and the traffic noise drops away behind a fence of tall trees. Inside is the University of Oslo's Botanical Garden, a yellow timber manor house from 1679 and three stately museum buildings from the early 1900s that look as if they were built to last a thousand years.
Tøyen is one of those Oslo neighbourhoods that visitors pass through on the way somewhere else. It deserves a slower look, because few places in the city show so many layers of its history on one short walk.
A fertilised meadow with a very long memory
The name itself is the oldest thing here. Tøyen comes from the Old Norse Taðvin, roughly "the fertilised meadow", a farm name that points to good soil and settlement long before the Viking Age.
In the Middle Ages the land belonged to Nonneseter Abbey, the convent that stood just outside medieval Oslo. If you have walked through the ruins described in our guide to Oslo's Old Town and its medieval remains, you have already been close to the institution that farmed these fields.
By the early 1600s the estate was in private hands. Around 1620 it was acquired by Jens Bjelke, Chancellor of Norway, and after his death in 1659 it went to his youngest son, Jørgen Bjelke.
Tøyen Manor, one of Oslo's oldest timber houses
The long, ochre-painted main building you see today, Tøyen hovedgård, was built in 1679. It is one of the oldest timber buildings in Oslo, which is remarkable in a city that burned as often as this one did.
The house was restored in 2006–07, and its interiors were returned to how they looked in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It now belongs to the Natural History Museum and is used by the university for receptions, so you will mostly admire it from the outside.
That is no hardship. Seen across the clipped hedges and gravel paths, with its red tiled roof and dormer windows, it is one of the most handsome old houses in the city.
The university that never moved in
In 1812 the estate was sold to King Frederik VI, who gave it to Norway's brand-new university. The idea was to build the whole institution here, on open land outside the town.
The plans were soon dropped as too grand and too expensive for the times. The university was built on Karl Johans gate instead, and its central buildings were finished in 1852.
Tøyen got something else. In 1814 work began on a botanical garden, and the farm's fields slowly turned into the green space that still surrounds the manor today.
How the Oslo Botanical Garden took root
The garden's first director was Christen Smith, appointed professor of botany in 1814. He barely saw the project begin, because he died on an expedition to the Congo in 1816.
He did leave a living souvenir. A Canary Island date palm grown from seed he sent home in 1815 became known as Smith's Palm, and it grew so tall that the greenhouse roof had to be raised for it. It was one of the garden's main attractions until it broke and died in the winter of 2000.
The layout came from Johan Siebke, a gardener brought in from the botanical garden in Copenhagen. His 1823 plan, inspired by the English landscape style, set curving paths inside an oval belt of trees and kept the old avenue up to the manor from the south.
You can still trace that design as you walk. The garden has since doubled in size, from about 75 to 150 decares, and now holds more than 4,500 kinds of plants.
What to see in the garden today
Most of the ground is arboretum, with big old trees and lawns where people from the neighbourhood read, picnic and push prams. The rest is divided into themed gardens.
The Rock Garden, opened in 1989, is a miniature mountain landscape with a stream and a small waterfall. Between 1,500 and 1,700 kinds of plants grow there, arranged by region, with Europe at the bottom, Asia in the middle and the Americas at the top.
Below it, the Viking Garden from 2014 is laid out in the shape of a 33-metre ship. It shows plants, stones and animal products the Vikings used, a neat companion to the story told in our piece on the Viking Age foundations of Oslo.
Then there are the greenhouses. The Palm House opened in 1868 and is one of Norway's oldest, with rooms for ancient seed plants, Mediterranean species and cacti.
The Victoria House followed in 1876, built to grow the giant Amazon water lily. When the plant first flowered there in 1879, visitor numbers jumped to more than 2,000 a day. The house turns 150 in 2026, but both greenhouses were listed as temporarily closed at the time of writing, so check before you plan a visit around them.
Granite museums and a house about climate
On the edge of the garden stand three monumental museum buildings, all designed by the architect Holger Sinding-Larsen. They were pushed through by the geologist W. C. Brøgger, the university's first rector, when the collections outgrew the old buildings on Karl Johans gate.
The Zoological Museum came first, built in 1904–08 and opened on 1 February 1910, with façades of rough-hewn granite. The Botanical Museum followed in 1913, opening in 1915, and the Geological Museum was finished in 1917.
Sinding-Larsen designed everything down to the display cases and furniture, in a strict Jugendstil. Today the buildings form the Natural History Museum, whose exhibitions are normally open Tuesday to Sunday.
A newer neighbour makes a striking contrast. The Climate House, opened in June 2020, is a timber building with solar panels that is designed to produce more energy over a year than it uses. It was a gift to the university from the businessman Jens Ulltveit-Moe and holds exhibitions about climate change.
Munch, a new pool and a neighbourhood in change
For many years Tøyen was also where people came to see Edvard Munch. The Munch Museum opened at Tøyengata 53 in 1963, in a building by Gunnar Fougner and Einar Myklebust.
It closed on 1 October 2021, after 58 years, and the collection moved to the new MUNCH tower in Bjørvika, which opened three weeks later.
Other changes have brought new life to the area. The old Tøyenbadet swimming hall from 1976 was torn down in 2020, and the new Tøyenbadet opened on 6 January 2025 as the largest swimming hall in Oslo, with four indoor and three outdoor pools.
Tøyen belongs to the borough of Gamle Oslo and is one of the city's most diverse neighbourhoods. Between 2014 and 2018 the city ran an area upgrade here with more than 40 projects, including a renewed Tøyen torg.
One result is Biblo Tøyen, opened in 2016, a public library just for children aged 10 to 15. It is a good sign of how the area sees itself: less a stop on a tourist route than a place where people actually live.
Visiting Tøyen and its gardens
Getting there is easy. Tøyen metro station sits under the shopping centre on the shared tunnel east of the city centre, and every line stops there; our guide to how Oslo's metro, trams and ferries fit together explains the system.
There is no entrance fee for the Botanical Garden. It is open every day from 07:00 to 17:00 in the colder months and until 21:00 from April through September, which makes it one of the easiest gardens in Oslo to drop into early or late.
Free guided tours of the garden run on Sundays, though they are in Norwegian. Spring and early summer are the best time for the Rock Garden, while autumn brings colour to the old trees around the manor.
Give it an hour or two. Walk the avenue up to Tøyen Manor, loop through the Rock Garden and the Viking ship, then wander back out to the square for coffee. In that short circuit you will cross more than three centuries of Oslo, from a chancellor's farm to a youth library, without ever leaving the neighbourhood.
About Sofia Berg
Sofia Berg is a lifelong Oslo resident and travel writer with a passion for uncovering the city's hidden gems. She has been exploring and writing about Oslo for over ten years.