Hallo all! Here, in the Netherlands, summer is gradually waning. We had this weekend a little summer stormlet, with announced wind at 7 bf. This was an opportunity to go out into the National Park I’m living next door to, the National Park Zuid-Kennemerland. I wanted to go because way out in it, there grows a flower, which flowers specifically in August, and which is rare and special and which has been adopted as local symbol by people round this town. (I sent the above foto to a locally grown friend and her first reaction was, hey, the flower of IJmuiden!)
The background is, I’m living in the coastal dunes of the Netherlands Coast, at the southern end of the North Sea, about as in the middle of our european metropolis as one can be. So the land is in large parts an assembly of cities and agroindustrial production space, but they protect their enclaves of remaining semi natural areas pretty well. They serve as recreational parks of course. The main parts of the most populous provinces of Holland lie at or below sea level and consist to a large part of land reclaimed from the sea, but they are protected by this dune belt, which is completely similar to dune belts in other continents, for instance in the Carolinas. Imagine, in the Carolina’s they would fill in the coastal lagoons and turn them into land: until the barrier islands simply become the outer end of the landmass. That is in principle what has happened here.
So, our dune belt is about six kilometers wide, and forms the backbone of the National Park. Through it runs the national bicycle highway connecting one end of the country to the other, which is obviously where I started the walk.
Now, the dune belt has a characteristic ecological pattern, oriented on how far away the sea is. I’ll come back to this at times. Because, at the sea, the wind is strongest, and over loose sand, it carries that sand. Many continental plants do no like this incessant wind-sand-blasting and cant go too near the coast. Also, that wind carries sea spray far inland, and that is salt water. So plants as they get to the sea have to be able to live with that salt. And finally, its loose unconsolidated sand. There is (naturally seen) hardly any nutrient source. Plants want nitrogen, potassium and phosphor, but the sand is just silica, mixed with finely ground seashell carbonate. It is windblown, and wind is able to sort types of grains extremely efficiently and therefore creates such zones where all the fertile mix that plants want, is absent. Thus, dune belts are characterized by their infertility — and that in turn: means that it is a refugium for plants (and animals) which specialize and thrive in these conditions. So, the dunes are roughly divided into three stripes, by waning influence of the sea: Furthest inland, the dunes are inactive and overgrown by an oak-beech-poplar forest. In a broad middle belt, its is “shrub” dunes, where the hardiest trees (willow, poplar) hang on, together with shrubs like hawthorn. And towards the sea, come the open dunes, where only grasses and low specialized plants and mosses and stuff cover the ground.
Obviously, I started at the end of the woodland dunes.
So, with these fotos in order one can see how the land gradually changes as one approaches the sea. I hope it can be seen. It always looks better if one is out there. But before i get out there, of course there were little things along the way!
grasshoppers are normally not easy, but this one is very characteristic. Only, had he not jumped, I’d never have seen him, and thought it was a piece of dirt. It really has blue wings and flies. It needs open sands to egg in, Too much grass, and its gone, thats why its not really a grasshopper :)
there were quite some butterflies, but they had trouble, getting blown about with such wings.
Thyme in the moss-grass mat on the ground. Thyme is everywhere in the dunes, this is thymus pulegioides. In the spring the dune grounds smells very strongly like thyme, but by now, its mostly faded. it was not so easy to fotograf plants. They waved about.
These are two views of our “Queens’ Weed”, Koninginnekruid, Eupatorium cannabinum. this is a characteristic late summer flower herearounds, very hard to get it to hoild still with its broad leaves catching the wind. it is one of the main things sustaining all the plant visiting insects at this time. But it is often in woodland shadow or halfshadow, as it was here in a poplar grove, Out here, wind is storng enough to blow little hollows into the ground, which if they go deep enough, fill with water. Which means, this:
But now out into the plains behind the last dune, where the land is open and the wind rules! Here, the wind heaps the sand into long ridges of dunes, and in between, where all sand gets blown away from, hollows remain. In these hollows, large and small, the water they have, is groundwater, or saltspray, or — mostly — rain water from the plentiful rain falling here. With the sand gone, what little clay there is accumulates in the low pans, and this makes the ground relatively water tight. So, rain water accumulates, and low swampy moss-grass flats develop.
and thats where the all the botanical niceties grow. Very unusual terrain.
We call centaurium the Thousand-Gulden-Weed (gulden being a coin,like a gold doubloon of Errol Flynn times). Its from the gentian family.
and thats this rain-fed dune valley grassland. Full of flowers. The ground is boggy wet. The two tiny white bulbs in the middle, before something I couldnt identify, are parnassia’s. Little bog stars.
this is its home.
Of course if someone throws a bomb into it, from great height, then it becomes a real mini-moor! People did that here, 75 years ago.
So, there are all kinds of fine little plant zones there, as you can see, since the water amount, ground dryness varies very strongly with every little bit of height. Where its just a bit drier, other nice things flower still in august:
That plant I had not expected. Its new to me.
Fleabane's common name comes from its former use as an incense to drive away insects.[5] Other past uses include treatments for dysentery and unspecified ocular maladies (Wiki).
Not that we need this to “drive away insects” nowadays … But now it was long enough and also it was getting evening and the plants began to close their flowers. So I went home. That’s all.
And if you dont believe there was any wind, you can watch this!
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