The true story of the foundation of Rapperswil, an exceptionally pretty medieval town on the northern shore of Lake Zurich, is long, complicated and, unless you’re a serious Swiss history buff, a bit of a fun-sponge. The made-up story is short, simple and charming.
Legend has it that at some point, in about the year 1229, a certain Rudolf, Count of Altendorf, was out hunting with his wife, Mechtild. His dogs chased a deer into a cave on a hillside, where two fawns were discovered, together with their terrified mother. Kindly Mechtild took pity on the creatures and persuaded Rudolf to spare them. Shortly afterwards, the doe reappeared and came to lay her head on Mechtild’s lap in gratitude. Rudolf took this as a sign from Heaven and resolved there and then to up sticks from nearby Altendorf and build a new castle on this blessed hill and a town — Rapperswil — on its slopes.
Rapperswil boasts more 15,000 rose bushes across multiple gardens, including a unique, highly fragrant garden designed specifically for the visually impaired.
The castle and the town are still there. The deer are, too, or, in any case, a herd of a dozen or so that are conceivably very similar to the deer of legend, grazing happily within the castle grounds.
Rapperswil’s castle and deer park are a big draw, as are Circus Knie and Knies Kinderzoo, a petting zoo run by the same family. The local ice-hockey team, the Rapperswil-Jona Lakers, is routinely mocked by supporters of other teams because its home arena is next door to the Kinderzoo.
Rapperswil is also much admired for its picturesque lakeside promenade, like something from an earlier, gentler, hoopskirted, boater-hatted time, and its traditional, no-frills badi or public swimming enclosure — likewise a place of nostalgia, albeit with pizza and hot dogs.
Most of all, however, Rapperswil is famous for its roses. Between May and October, the stony surfaces of the Old Town are softened and enlivened by tens of thousands of blooms, concentrated in four main gardens. Each has its own particular history and character, but their collective effect is overwhelming.
Setting off from my conveniently located base at the Hotel Speer, part of the Sorell group and recently crisply renovated, I spent the best part of a day exploring the town and its gardens in the company of a local guide, Astrid Steiner-Brändli.
Two of the gardens are planted on land belonging to a Capuchin monastery. One of them used to be an orchard. The monks, Astrid reassured me, are compensated for the loss of their fruit-related income. Presumably, this is a modest sum, as the plot could scarcely have provided enough fruit to keep the brothers in jam through the winter.
Another of the gardens, the smallest and quirkiest, was planted by Lennart Bernadotte, himself a colourful figure, a grandson of Gustaf V of Sweden who was stripped of his princely and ducal titles for daring to marry a commoner against his family’s wishes.
The fourth is a garden for the blind, planted with fragrant varieties and with signs in braille — a place of transcendent wonder. Science tells us that our sensory system can identify five core tastes: sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami, but taste only accounts for a small proportion of our overall experience of flavour, possibly as little as 5%. The rest comes from smell. We have about 9,000 taste buds, but between five million and 10 million receptors capable of detecting smell. Smell is the only one of our senses that bypasses the brain’s switchboard, the thalamus, connecting directly to the limbic regions, which deal with emotions, memory and arousal or stimulation.
It was in the garden for the blind that I recalled a visit to Inveraray Castle, in the west of Scotland, with my parents, several years ago. My mother was, at that time, in the grip of quite advanced Parkinson’s. There were days when she found speech so difficult she simply stopped talking. It was one of those days. She was silent as we wandered through the castle, among the endless suits of armour, tapestries, Meissen china and other Campbell keepsakes, but when we stepped out into the garden and began to walk among the avenues of shrubbery, she perked up immediately. ‘Hibiscus syriacus; Digitalis purpurea; Centaurea cyanus,’ she said. ‘Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ — ah, you are beautiful!’ She greeted every plant by name. Now and then, she would pause and breathe in the fragrance of a flower. This went on and on: the naming, the sniffing, until it became clear to me that she could have done it blindfolded, all day. I was the one left speechless.
'We have about 9,000 taste buds, but between five million and 10 million receptors capable of detecting smell'
Fluency of that kind can be acquired and added to — and sadly lost — at almost any point in a person’s life, although I suppose that, as with foreign languages, it is most readily picked up sooner rather than later, absorbed naturally and unconsciously in early childhood.
In her book First Bite, the food historian Bee Wilson describes a 2009 experiment in which electrodes were attached to the heads of a group of French men and women, half of whom were of Algerian descent, half of whom were not. They were then obliged to smell fresh mint leaves, with the electrodes measuring the intensity of their responses.
Those of Algerian descent showed a significantly higher level of neural activity than the rest of the group. Might this indicate the extent to which, for them, the taking of mint tea is not merely a casual or occasional pleasure, but a matter of profound, soul-deep significance? At any rate, the result seems not only to support the view that memory is the most important factor when accounting for our lifelong passions for certain smells and their associated flavours, but also, intriguingly, to raise the possibility that this is a process that begins before we are born.
Thus it was that I found myself in pieces in the garden for the blind in Rapperswil — one piece of me in the luminous, fragrant present, other pieces in the rose gardens of my childhood, another piece by my late mother’s side on a neatly raked gravel footpath in the grounds of Inveraray.
Whoever recommended stopping to smell the roses was onto something — and there can be few lovelier places to do so than Rapperswil.
The writer was a guest of Switzerland Tourism. He flew from Scotland to Switzerland with Edelweiss, which operates flights between Edinburgh and Zurich twice a week. He stayed at the Sorell Hotel Speer Rapperswill; rooms cost from £153 a night bed-and-breakfast. Click here for more information on Rapperswil.
This feature originally appeared in the May 20, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.