‘Amsterdam takes good care of nature,’ says biologist and formerNRCscience editor Rob Biersma (77). “The canals are cleaner than about a quarter of a century ago, Queen Máxima – then princess – swam through the canal during the Amsterdam City Swim in 2012. The air is also cleaner.”
Biersma wrote the book together with a number of urban ecologists, biologists and passionate nature lovers Wild Amsterdam – The nature of the city. The starting point is a powerful statement: urban planning and nature are not enemies. This is also thanks to the people of Amsterdam themselves: from the 1980s onwards they became intensively involved with the greenery in their area. By Wild Amsterdam Biersma did the final editing, more than three years of work. He wrote interviews, short column-like texts and some larger contributions.
In his younger years, Biersma wandered through the reclamation sites of the Rotterdam port area, where he grew up – later he studied biology and chemistry in Amsterdam, the city where he now lives. Before he went to college, he did his military service and sailed on a riding barge for a year. His proposal now is to go on a nature report in the Houtrakpolder near Spaarnwoude, in the western port area of the city. You get there via a maze of roads, we get wedged between huge trucks. Biersma calls it a “characteristic piece of Amsterdam nature”.
The book Wild Amsterdam covers what is called Greater Amsterdam and includes large nature reserves on the edges of the city, Waterland, Diemen with the Diemer Vijfhoek, Amsterdamse Bos, Bretten, Landje van Geijsel near the Ouderkerkerplas, even Marken participates and of course the city center itself. “The fact that Amsterdam is good for nature has to do with the fact that the city is connected to nature in the countryside thanks to the famous wedges or lobes. Thanks to these green wedges, such as the Beatrix Park or the Bretten zone, nature can easily enter the city. Moreover, the tile-wapping project is a great success; the city dwellers are replacing tiled sidewalks and gardens with facade gardens,” says Biersma.
The inspiring thing about the book is that you experience strongly that nature is everywhere, even in unexpected places. The Houtrakpolder is located right on the North Sea Canal from 1876. It was once part of the Oer-IJ with an open connection to the Zuiderzee. Initially the polder consisted of arable land, in the 1980s it was given the function of a green buffer and the first trees were planted there, the Noorderbos. Biersma visits there often and wrote a chapter about it, especially about the invasive exotic species called dike felt burr, which originally comes from the Caucasus. This shrub can grow six meters per year by very efficiently ‘sending’ long arcuate shoots from the root system meters away and re-rooting where they touch the ground. And so on.
Rob Bierma in De Houtrak.
Large teasel.
Photos Bram Petraeus
One of the striking places in the polder is the Groene Schip, a nature and recreational hill of thirty meters high that was built on a former chemical toxic dump. The poison is covered with foil. At the foot of it grows the bramble bush that Biersma described. He points to the growth habit and turns over the leaf: it is grayish in color and indeed feels felty: “It is one of the most spiny blackberry species, which forms an impenetrable hedge. It is of little use to birds. But the blackberries taste excellent. In August I often see blackberry pickers here, especially of Turkish origin.”
We climb the hill and a mighty view unfolds there, says Biersma. On one side the port area with coal storage, bright yellow colored cranes and cargo ships and on the other side nature. Geese pass over, the melodious call of barnacle geese can be heard. In the distance, on the eastern horizon, lies Amsterdam; we see the high-rise buildings. It is in a place like this where the great contrasts that come with a port city come together: industry on the one hand, nature on the other. As in the book, we pay attention to the smallest plants, for example the soft green color of the rapeseed that grows on the hillside.
Biersma: “It was deliberate that the chapter about the city’s plant wealth is at the heart of the book. It is called ‘Between heat and tranquility’ and that indicates exactly what the core of urban nature is. A city with all that stone is a heat island during the summer months, on average the temperature is a few degrees higher than outside. To combat heat stress, people and animals in a city need cooling, which is what the green trees provide. Amsterdam is one of the world cities with the most trees, especially the elms, the pride of the city. Four centuries ago, they started planting them along the canals, you see them depicted on the old city maps.”
As we walk down the hill and past the poplars of the Noorderbos, Biersma points out the many dead trees, which are probably unable to withstand the salty seepage water that penetrates through the higher water level of the North Sea Canal. He calls it a “rough sight.” Here, in the harbor and along the highway and the railway, is also a place where exotic species can invade the city, such as the felt burr or the much-feared Japanese knotweed. They travel on train wagons, ship holds or the wheel arches of trucks from far away places.
Dead trees in De Houtrak.
Photo Bram Petraeus
You have to get rid of the idea that southern species are necessarily bad species
The “trade and business of today’s city residents who buy container plants in garden centers and other greenery also contributes to the city’s rich flora,” Biersma notes. “You shouldn’t be too strict or restrictive about this, the exotics also make it exciting and provide new bloomers. Sometimes they have a short life. Only when they start to take over, like that blackberry, then it becomes a problem. You have to get rid of the idea that southern species are by definition bad species. Even an urban tree like the plane tree is, after all, a stranger.”
‘Hopeful’, that’s how you get the gist of it Wild Amsterdam can name. The city is the ultimate repository of all types of nature. In a pond and wetland area right on the harbor we easily count a whole group of ground ducks, some little grebes, snipe, great yellow wagtail and other beautiful things. A forest ranger from Staatsbosbeheer reports that a white-tailed eagle just flew over; we just missed that one. That majestic eagle is also one of the more than ten thousand wild plants and animals that have the city as a habitat. The realization must sink in: a bird of prey with a wingspan of 2.5 meters and flora between the stone joints, it is all urban nature.
Urban natureA cheerful and optimistic book
The richly illustrated Wild Amsterdam was designed by Henry Cannon and offers a sample of what nature means in a big city. It is a cheerful, versatile and optimistic book, full of images of mainly the smallest creatures, mushrooms, insects, fungi and plants that occur in a city.
The chapter on plants by urban ecologist Ton Denters alone makes you almost fall in love with everything that grows between paving stones, in facade gardens and in forgotten, overgrown corners. Denters sees the city as a fully-fledged ‘nature domain’ and he is the inventor of the concept of ‘urban district’, a place where the city’s own nature flourishes. He also calls it ‘Wildgrowth’, a new word that has been included in the Van Dale and emphatically not a weed. You can also call it rough herbs, everything that just grows right in front of our feet with beautiful names such as small love grass, stiff love grass, natural snapdragon, marjoram, chervil, rosalientje and bedroom happiness. The last plant is hardly noticeable, it is minuscule and hides between the joints of clinkers and stones, it is a real ‘joint filler’. Denters calls all this new urban flora ‘versatile and festive’.
Wild Amsterdam is a publication on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the Amsterdam branch of the Royal Dutch Nature Association (KNNV). Initially it was a Natural History Society, but the country council decided to leave out the ‘historical’ as it would be too old-fashioned, although this was against the wishes of the Amsterdam department. According to editor Rob Biersma, it did not necessarily have to be a membership book, but a book intended for a large audience, and above all it had to appeal to young people. The alternation of interviews with ecologists, scientists and naturalists from the KNNV with essayistic pieces increases readability.
The choice of subject is also diverse: we go into the night with bat researchers, we travel with swift enthusiasts to urban breeding sites, preferably under roof tiles in old buildings, we crawl on the ground to look for plants in stone joints and go out onto the water to find the so-called brackish trio, three species of fish in the IJ behind Central Station depending on the depth: at the top in the fresh water the perch, a little deeper in brackish water the flounder and the saltwater-loving herring in the deepest water. We visit school gardens, cemeteries and allotments. Everything between moss and hawk is discussed.
Amsterdam urban ecologists such as Martin Melchers, Remco Daalder, Geert Timmermans, Hans Kaljee and KNNV historian Finette van der Heide explain the importance of collecting and sharing natural knowledge. Pieter Wetzels writes an interesting piece about the revolutionary digital tools, the apps, with which you can easily recognize species on your smartphone, such as ObsIdentify and Merlin Bird ID. The Waarneming.nl database is the great treasure trove of many hundreds of thousands of observations.
The great thing about the book is that it opens your eyes to urban nature. For example, look at what grows or blooms spontaneously in the basalt slope of a canal like the Singelgracht. Or take the Stenen Hoofd, a former landing point of the Holland-America Line. It is a popular urban nature spot, irregularly overgrown between stone and concrete, but unprecedentedly rich in species such as stiff dravik, datura, saxifrage fern and spur flower. More towards the city center, on Prinseneiland, there is a real palm garden and a fig tree grows on the Drieharingen Bridge.
