Considered a rogue nature preserve, Vartiosaari hosts an unusually
rich collection of woody plant species in a variety of landscapes. “The
whole island is only eighty-three hectares, yet it feels much larger,”
said Leppänen. Many people manage to get lost here, but they seem to
be happy after many hours of being lost. I think it’s a health effect to
get lost.”
In the early twentieth century, a managing director of Nokia (then
a wood pulp and rubber company) liked the island of Vartiosaari so
much that he quit his job to live there, building a house called
Quisisana, from the Latin, meaning “where one heals.” To enhance
the island’s salutary attributes and create more momentum to protect
the place from encroaching development, Leppänen cobbled together
some funding from the Finnish Forest Research Institute and the city
of Helsinki and marked out a “health nature trail,” complete with
signposts, recommended exercises and descriptions.
This isn’t your typical park fitness trail. Our first stop was a big
gray boulder, a glacial erratic that toppled off an iceberg when the
island was once underwater. The far-traveling rock, said Leppänen,
reminds us of the importance of moving, of exercise. It’s a
metaphysical StairMaster. We walked on a few paces and arrived at a
small outdoor chapel featuring a stone altar, a timbered cross and
bark-sided benches to remind us of spirituality in nature. Next we
considered a mutant pine tree, growing outward at waist-height
instead of growing upward. Leppänen called it “the table of Tapio”
after a Finnish forest god. “This can be for our offerings, a symbol of
gratitude,” he said. “To be grateful is good for your health. Today we
can be grateful to ourselves for visiting this forest!” We walked along
to a stone-laid labyrinth the size of a large living room. This was
constructed by locals in 1999, but it’s a nod to an ancient islander
tradition. No one’s really sure what the old labyrinths were for, but to
Leppänen they represent mystery, wandering and play.
This is about the time it struck me that the Finland of grown-ups