About me: I got my knowledge of plants through membership of nature studygroups, starting when I was 14. In college, my major was psychology, and I got a degree in it. But in my first full time job, that lasted 6 years, I was a field botanic again; the job entailed mapping ecological interesting vegetation in my Province. So, every day I went out with maps and books and lunch and mosquito-and-brambles-proof clothing and mapped every bit of land that wasn’t private or built on. Currently, I mostly write reports, but I still know quite a bit about plants. Over the years I also gave several courses in botany to various groups, and I was proud to be able to make botany fun. I just love plants; they’re so beautifully built and varied and yummy and fun and alive…
Are there problems with non-native species? If so, can you list some examples. Is there any movement to return to native plants only in regards to lawns?
How do you tell species apart? Do you use keys or do you just know from experience? Any tips for learning species names? I’ve taken a couple courses that involved identifying plant species with keys and I often had to give up and ask a local classmate who just knew what the plants were.
There are regular occurences of problems with invasive plants. Problems with escaped pond plands are often the most spectacular, as they can become pests, completely filling up our waterways and mintefering with watermanagement. Examples from the recent past include Elodea canadensis, and, more recent, Hydrocotyle ranunculoides. In our woods Prunis serotina or Wild Cherry has been a problem for years, and it costs many tax-dollars to keep it more or less under control.
The usual pattern goes like this: Plant is imported in the Netherlands, often for it’s decorative value - plant becomes a hit in gardens and garden ponds - people throw out garden waste into nature - plant becomes a pest - watership asks for the banning of the plant from selllers because the plant interferes with good watermanagement, creating a possible danger hazard- no ban follows, but sellers put a feeble sign in the store next to the plant saying: " don’t throw the plant out". Or better yet, they put an inconspicuous leaflet near the counter. :rolleyes:
In the end, either the plant finds ecological balance (that happened to Elodia canadensis) because its natural enemies find it again (or it finds new enemies, to the interest of ecologists and botanists all over Holland). Or, everybody gets used to the problem and fighting the “exote” becomes everyday policy. To give another example from of the latter from the animal world: my province employs people who have a full-time job trapping and killing Muskrats because its burrowing causes damage to dykes and levees.
There are also quite a few non-native plants that don’t behave like pests, but are valuable or just innocent and remarkable additions to our Dutch Flora (which currently entails about 1400 species). For instance, there’s Cochlearica danicawihich used to be a very rare plant on stony beaches. The past twenty years have shown an incredible (and very traceable) expansion of the plant, lining our motorways, because it can stand the salt thrown on the moterways each year to keep ice away.
Yes, that’s a bit of a catch-22, a learning phase you just have to plod through.
Once you know a couple of plants from a certain family, it becomes easier and easier to see the “family resemblance”. But for that you just have to individually know a couple (say three to five) members of each botanical family first.
Compare them next to each other, and pay special attention to how they are alike (and different). Once you’ve mastered that (and that need not take more then an hour per family), you begin to see the big picture of plants. The best thing about botany is that once you have consicously seen the family characeristics, you can never “unsee” them again. That is no different in botany then, say, telling baroque songs apart from romantic ones or Harley moterbikes from other bikes. (or whatever your own area of expertise is )
My best advice is to start with botanical families that share a lot of characteristics anyway: Umbelliferae, Cruciferae and Labiatae. This book, ""Botany in a day"follows about the same learning method I use in my botany classes.
My best friend Audrey has a Master’s in biology, with a specialty in botany. She moved to IJmuiden last year, and I miss her very much. If, while in the field, you bump into a pretty blue-eyed blond trying to make sense of non-American flora, can you give her a hug for me?
Probably a dumb question but, do you have Poison Ivy there? If not, are there plants (native or otherwise) that are a royal pain while foraging in the woods? Like say a plant like Devil’s Club?
Here in the lovely south of Holland, poison ivy is so unheard of that, well, doctors can repeatedly miss the diagnosis. They say it can grow here but I have never seen it aroudn here – though I have neither travelled widely in Holland nor studied it so am sort of talking out my ass. I have seen it in a garden, proudly dispayed as an exotic ornamental plant (urk).
In these parts there is however rather a lot of stinging nettle, both large and small. The small ones are especially annoying as they grow amoung other plants (like blackberries) and grab you without warning.
Burrido, no, we don’t have Devils Club or Poison Ivy. When I read about Poison Ivy I always wondered about how exactly people got hurt by it. Actually I still don’t know, I guess I have to google it later.
What we do have, however, is the common Stinging Nettle,, Urtica Dioica. What makes it unavoidable is how MUCH we have of nettles in the Netherlands. I swear, especially on moist fertile (rich in nitrate) ground (and most ground is moist and rich in nitrate here) they make up at least a third of the vegetation. Anyone going out for a hike in the Netherlands in shorts is IMHO crazy.
We also have brambles. Brambles grow on drier ground, so once you veer off the cleared path, you either have to deal with brambles OR stinging nettles. I guess you know brambles? Well, Hollands problems with overfertilisation have left us with SuperBrambles. Long, thorny, and intent on tripping their victims.
In recent years, Giant Hogweed another escaped garden plant, also has become a problem.
I have a question: how do I find out what happens with the plants in Holland in the third week of October?
For three years running I have allergies which begin in or around the third week of October. The huisarts just noted this, while he was looking at something else in his computer record about me. So we are both waiting to see what happens in about a month.
I had some pollen allergies in the US as a teen but they went away. The huisarts is suggesting it may not be pollen at all, as this approximately coincides in his memory to when the heat went on the past two years – he says many people from humid climates are sensitive to the dryness of the air caused by radiant heat.
Maybe. But that seems like a large coincidence to me and I wonder if any plants cut loose with anything that late in the year. I do not however know how to find out. In the US, the ag folks publish a year round pollen calendar you can look up: does anything like that exist here?
What an interesting question! I assume you are in the Netherlands, but, due to language, can’t access Dutch pollen-calenders on line?
I looked up a few but none of them indicate any plants blooming end October that haven’t been flowering in the months before as well. Fungae, also sometimes causers of allergy, also operate year-round, although I don’t know enough about it to make a guess if October sees different airborne fungae spores then other months. Maybe I got a simple pollencalender on-line though. They appear to be selling more elaborate ones.
The only plant I know of that blooms in October, and not before, is the Jerusalem Artichoke. Some major rivers (the Maas, that I know of) has mass vegetations of that plant along its banks.
I suspect other causes, though. Holland is densely populated, so your own guess might be correct that your allergy is caused by everybody starting the heating season at the same time. In Holland, that means that every household exhales the remains of natural gas when weeks before very few people did.
Another possible culprit may be the Sugarbeet. These sugarbeets are collected and factory processed en masse from the end of september to year end. People living near such a beetfactory have reported about a sickly smell in the air around that time of year.
If you can elaborate whereabouts in the Netherlands you live and what kind of landscape you daily pass (city, gardens, farmlands, grassfields, industry, forest, river) I might find other relevant info.
A great deal, and none. Dutch Elm disease has been a problem for several decades, wiping out most of the elmtrees in the Netherlands. Attempts to eradicate the disease have failed, and getting resistant clones didn’t prove possible. Of course, over the years, new elms have sprung up here and there from roots or seed, but those remain still susceptible, and occasionally, succumb.
The current take (I got it from this report, in Dutch) is that Elmtrees are no longer a major component of Dutch woods. So, if a young elm somewhere in a forest succumbs, no-one cares. However, if the Elm is old and a key element of the landscape (old beautiful big trees in the centre of villages or towns or in any other place where they would be missed) the owner of keeping organiszation might put quite a bit of money and effort into keeping the tree alive. Injecting the tree currently is a costly, but effective measure.
Our new problem currently is the tiny moth Cameraria ohridella that feeds on the leaves of the Common Horse Chestnut.The moth arrived from central Europe, it’s wings glued to wet cars, less then a decade ago. Since then, three generations of the moth per year make the leaves of Chestnut trees brown and crinkled by the beginning of August ! The trees weaken considerably because their feeding season is so severly shortened. The only known remedy is raking and burning chestnut leaves every fall, as the larvae pass winter in the leaves. You guys in America better watchs out and keep that moth outside your borders for as long as possible.
Well, Dutch elm disease was a major blight here, and in the early part of the 20th century, cut a wide swath through the nation’s elms. But now, the elm trees seem to have come back strongly, and I’m not sure why. Did the Dutch come back and repossess their disease? Do tell!
Yes, the problem is I learned my Dutch at home from my spouse. I speak Dutch quite well but have lingering literacy issues – in particular issues around spelling and specialized vocabulary. I didn’t know what they were called in Dutch, which makes them hard to Google.
In Oosterhout, Noord-Brabant. It’s a medium sized town and we live right in the center. Spitting distance (okay, bicycling distance) from the Biesbosch --which I love very much and has comforted me mightily when I am homesick. If there is significant industry here they keep it pretty well under wraps. We are downwind of the Amercentrale, but I doubt they rev that sucker up in the Fall or anything.
Probably it is something in the house, it is even by Dutch standards a very old house. I just wondered idly and had no way to check.
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