How much I enjoy being back in the dunes on the island.

Photos of the wildflowers I saw today in the dunes.

Wildflowers on the island Schouwen-Duiveland

After the days in New York City last week, I briefly returned to Ottawa. I will mainly remember this short stay because there was no electricity or warm water in the house. It was a strange experience having to find my way around the house by the light of my smartphone. On the first day after the storm, some 900,000 people were affected. But after a week of non-stop repair work, that number was down to several tens of thousands. It was a week when friends and colleagues swapped chargers and headlights. Charged kindles proved to be better than books, although books by candlelight proved to be preferable to uncharged kindles. 

I try to fly as little as possible, but there are no realistic alternatives to get to Europe. So, a few days ago, I took a flight to the Netherlands. I arrived early in the morning at Schiphol airport in bright sunlight, which was bedtime for all those on board. In my mid-fifties, I find it harder to adjust to the time difference than it used to be in the days that I was regularly in NYC for UN-related meetings. I remember in those days that I just went home, took a shower, and went straight to the office. Instead, I went directly to bed this time, only to find out I couldn’t sleep.

A first island walk

Today was the first time I could take a few hours for a walk in nature. I love it to be back on ‘my’ island. Some of you may remember it from the fifty or so “Island Stories” that I wrote here last year about the history and nature of this island. So today, I went to the nature areas not far from home. 

Walking to the west, I entered the ‘Zeepeduinen”. You will recognize the word dunes in the second part of the word. But the word “Zeepe” isn’t easy to understand even for native speakers of Dutch. Actually, English speakers may find it easier to understand what it means. Replace “zeep” for “seep,” and you get the idea. It refers to the water transfer from the higher dunes to the low-lying polders after the water seeps through the dunes. I don’t think any Dutchman would still see the linguistically old connection between “Zeepe” and the old Dutch verb “seepelen,” which we still know as the relatively infrequently used verb “sijpelen.” Perhaps our language is, in this case, easier understandable for foreigners than for native speakers of Dutch. 

Wildflowers

I will write more about this beautiful area in these summer months because I hope to often return here between travels. But, for now, let me share a few photo impressions of today:

Cornflower (all flower photos: Alexander Verbeek)

I love the wildflowers. Here are at least three easy-to-recognize ones. The blue cornflower is now endangered in its native habitats of European cornfields due to agricultural intensification and the increased use of herbicides. But since it is such a pretty flower, it is now increasingly used as an ornamental plant in gardens in the U.S. and Australia. A neat way to survive as the fittest, just by being pretty. 

Chamomile

The white-yellow flower is wild chamomile. You may know it from chamomile tea or for its use against gastrointestinal problems and skin problems. 

Poppy

The red ones are, and you had already recognized them, poppies, more specifically corn poppies. The Papaver rhoeas, with common names as the common poppy, corn rose, red poppy, and, of course, the Flanders poppy, is part of the poppy family Papaveraceae. These will likely remind you as the symbol of remembrance of the fallen soldiers during the First World War. They provide color to the landscape, and Claude Monet must have loved them for that. 

Claude Monet

If your first association with poppies is not the First World War, it may likely be the image of Monet’s wife Camile and their son Jean strolling through a field of poppies on a summer’s day. I assume this only because it is my first association whenever I see poppies blooming. 

I wonder if I am the first to connect Monet’s painting to the opening shots of the Little House on the Prairie. I just searched on the internet but couldn’t find anything: here are both images, in terrible quality, but it gives the idea. Do you see what I mean?

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Notes:

Since I want to give the source for this still from a video, I might as well share the whole scene that anyone of my age and older has seen more than we wanted two, which makes everyone younger than me wonder if I really watched this while growing up. (Full story summarized: While growing up in the 1970s in the Netherlands, there was only one television channel. The evangelicals had a monopoly on broadcasting one day every week, meaning the three hours a day we had any television. This was all television had to offer for kids on Wednesdays). Double click on “watch on YouTube”.