Trees
Over this past year my mobility and energy levels have become very much reduced and instead of whole day hikes over mountains I seem now limited to a maximum of between an hour and two hours of quite slow walking among the much reduced mountains of Noord Holland, so I am forced to seek local landscapes not too far from home or a car park. Fortunately we live on the border of the Kennemerduinen and Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen as well as having Elswout right on the doorstep. The duingebiet of course has mountains of sand.
Elswout I have photographed on and off since 1987 and have observed large changes, especially since the Covid epidemic when huge numbers of people visited and the Staatsbosbeheer found it necessary to react to people treating it as a speelterrein and not the artwork from the 18th and 19th centuries that it is. This seems to have meant many alterations that erode its original design and philosophy. It was a superbly skilful essay in the style of the English landscape architect Humphrey Repton and had it been completed would probably have been one of the best in Europe. But so many of its references to classical ideas have become lost in these adaptations, making it less pleasurable to someone like myself though not to the general trend of viewing it as a nature reserve or the apparent trend towards a theme park. In addition the conversion of the house into offices seems to have stimulated some access restrictions.
After living in a Spanish coastal mountain wilderness for many years I generally find the Dutch landscape rather dull but greatly appreciate access available in the dunes, most particularly the freedoms of the Amsterdamse Waterleiding, though as my first paragraph indicates, I am now much more restricted in where I can go. But the woodlands of both the dune systems give great opportunities for tree studies at all seasons due to their exposure to gales. In particular now in the Kennemerduinen we note the rise in sea levels. Dune formation is ridges of blown sand with hollows of relict beach and salt marsh called slacks. The slacks have long been subject to seasonal ground water level rises, supporting parnassia, dwarf willow and mint but most are now permanently flooded quite deeply, drowning those and trees that had colonised the hollows.
My selection is a small part of a collection celebrating trees, trying to see both the wood and the trees. Most abundant in the dunes seem to be American oaks, with areas of bright Aspens, distorted and undistorted birches and magnificent European pines, thankfully not spruce which dominates Scottish uplands, as punctuations in the dialogue. But also included here are one or two photographs of woodlands in East Devon, also exposed to the sea but much more gently, there topping huge mounds of fossilised sand from geologically ancient deserts. That too was once a delta. More of those will come later perhaps.
All these derive from high definition images but they get muddied by reduction from 30+Mb to 1Mb.
