Arden Fair is Sacramento’s fashion destination, offering a selection of premier apparel and specialty stores including Apple, Coach, lululemon athletica, Quay Australia and Macy’s in a beautifully designed center. Arden Fair is also home to a variety of restaurants, including Seasons 52, BJ’s Restaurant Brewhouse, Gen Korean BBQ House and 85C Bakery, and a wide array of retail and services.
The arden is a place that seems at once both familiar and mysterious, an ancient and modern vision of the English countryside that, in antiquity and the Early Modern Period, encompassed parts of Warwickshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire (in modern West Midlands). Shakespeare’s forest comedies are rooted in the arden as well; his writings have promulgated the arden vision as the idealized autostereotype of merry England, inspiring artists such as the Pre-Raphaelite John Collier.
Among other things, the arden was an area of woodland in which bears and wolves roamed; it had a dense cover of broadleaf trees, and it had a variety of streams that provided water. In medieval times the Knights Templar held a preceptory at Temple Balsall, in the middle of the arden. After the suppression of the Templars in 1312, the forest gradually became enclosed and deforested.
The arden continues to be a special and meaningful part of our community. You can learn more about the arden as a cultural and historical landscape by visiting the Arden History Museum and attending events hosted by the Village’s Woods Committee, such as the annual ivy “pulls.” You can also help keep the arden a natural retreat by learning how to recognize and remove invasive species from our woods.