BELGIUM &
THE NETHERLANDS
MAY 2002 (A
FEW APRIL 1992)
BELGIUM
The
first set of pictures were taken at and within the greenhouses often called
the Glass City in Brussels, Belgium. The Royal Castle gardens at
Laeken lie in the hills at the edge of Brussels. The castle is the home
of the royal family of Belgium, so the gardens are closed the rest of the
year.
The
glass city was built in the late 1800's for King Leopold II. The gardens
are open to the public for 3 weeks in the springtime each year, usually
the last two weeks of April and the first week of May. I saw them on the
first weekend of May in 2002.
The tremendous size of the complex
is astonishing. There are several very large greenhouses
(large enough to hold mature palm trees) connected by long galleries.
Fuschias, geraniums, camellias and other flowers grow up the sides and
are suspended from the ceilings of the galleries.
Visitors can walk through
the gardens, about a mile within the greenhouses, at their own pace.
There is a constant stream of visitors, but one can step to the side of
the path and linger to enjoy and photograph the incredible beauty.
THE NETHERLANDS
Before
my Bike and Barge tour of the Netherlands, I visited Terschelling Island.
This lovely sandy isle is one of the Friesian Island chain that borders the North Sea on the northern
coast of the nation. It is reached by ferry from Harlingen, north of the
great dike that created the inland sea called Ijsselmeer. The picture at
the left shows the red tile roofs and the tall lighthouse tower of the main
town on the island, which faces the shallow sea between the islands and the
mainland. In the foreground are boardwalk steps up the sand dune that lies
between the town and the North Sea.
The Bike and Barge
tour, I took was sponsored by Bicycle Adventure
Club and led by Wes Conner of San Luis Obispo. It was a loop tour south
from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, then north along the coast via The Hague, world-famous
Keukenhof Gardens, the 2002 Floriade (International Flower Show held in
Amsterdam every ten years) to the northern tip of Holland peninsula separating
Ijsselmeer from the North Sea, and then south along the coast of Ijsselmeer
back to Amsterdam. 
These windmill pictures were taken at Kinderdijk near Rotterdam, early
on our tour. The greenish-yellow (or is it yellowish-green?) jackets
you'll see in some of the pictures are our "group garment."
The fact that much of the Netherlands is below sea level
can be detected in this shot. The water body at the upper right of
the picture, held back by the dike on which my friend in the green jacket
is sitting with one of our tour leaders from the barge, is Ijsselmeer, the
large fresh water body separated from the North Sea by another dike. The pasture
below us and the road along which our bikes are parked is clearly well below
the level of Ijsselmeer, which is about the same level as the North Sea.
The gray-white blobs in the grass on the other side of the small pond
are sheep, grazing on the lush grass.
Keukenhof Gardens
is open to the public for a couple of months each spring when the spring flowers
are in bloom. It is in my opinion the most beautiful sight in the country
of my ancestors, which has many wonderful sights to see. Even at the very
end of the season this year (mid-May 2002), the gardens were lovely.
But I remembered how
much more glorious they were in mid-April of 1992.
These
three pictures are from that visit.
This "river" of blue hyacinths I saw at Keukenhof in 1992 gave me the
idea for the "river and pool" of blue lobelias I use now in my gardens at
Los Osos.
Keukenhof Gardens
has many streams, ponds, and small lakes. The reflections of the woods
and flowers in them is spectacular, as in this view from 1992.
Every ten years, in years number ...2, the Dutch host an international
flower show they call Floriade. I saw the Floriade in 1992 while on sabbatical
leave and was determined to visit Holland again for this one in 2002. So
I jumped at the opportunity to do so in the course of Wes's bike ride, which
he, a landscape architect, planned around this Floriade. This view,
including the far side of the lake, Haarlemmermeer, covers a third or less of
the area in this Floriade. These exhibitions are huge. The Floriade
is held in a different place in Holland each time.
The Floriade, of course, includes beautiful gardens of Dutch flower bulbs,
such as these tulips and hyacinths, while they are in season. The Floriade
itself begins at the beginning of the spring flower season but continues
through the summer into autumn.
These orchids were part of a greenhouse exhibit at the Floriade.
The next 4 pictures were taken of especially beautiful flowers
in a greenhouse in the botanical garden at Leiden.
The flowers hanging at the right are quite astonishingly
exactly that shade of blue-green. The picture has not been altered
in any way for color.
The plant at the left is one of the world's largest flowers. Called, inelegantly,
the Stinkplant, it is supposed to have a vile odor. Fortunately that
was not evident on the day I visited it.
This view is on the coast of Ijsselmeer in North Holland.
Our
tour in mid-May was unfortunately too late for most of the flowers in the
open fields. Most had been cut so they would not pull strength from the bulbs
by going to seed, the bulbs being the commercial crop, after all. However,
this field of iris near the northern tip of the Holland peninsula was still
beautifully in bloom.
These orchids were blooming in the botanical garden in Amsterdam.
The botanical garden in Amsterdam had one greenhouse devoted to lovely
butterflies
and moths reproducing in the greenery. I was delighted with the way
my new digital camera
with zoom lens enabled me to get pictures of them like these three.
The welwitschia plant to the right also grows in a greenhouse in the Amsterdam
Botanical Garden. It is native to an African desert. It can live to
be more than a hundred years old, but never has more than two strap-like
leaves, which erode at the tips but keep growing from the center of the plant.
I saw European storks a number of times in the Netherlands, but these
nesting on the grounds at the Amsterdam Zoo were accustomed to people and
easy to photograph on their nest.
The zoo had a large
colony of northern gannets.
Gulls are difficult to identify, being quite variable in color patterns
between sexes, between adults and juveniles, and seasonally. I saw
many of these on my Netherlands tours, but too briefly to look up. So getting
this patient fellow with my digital camera at Amsterdam Zoo let me look him
up later in my bird guides and identify him as a black-headed gull (which
typically has a chocolate-brown rather than black head--an example of one
of the many problems one encounters with common names of species). I
identified this and other birds in the Netherlands using Petersons's Vogelgids.
It's in Dutch, (Vogel is Dutch for bird) but going from the picture
to the text rewards one with the common name in 4 languages, fortunately
including English. I find this bird also in David Sibley's outstanding guide
for North America, produced by the Audubon Society. He indicates it has been
seen in "rare occurrences" over much of the United States, notably including
coastal Califonia.
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