It must have been a strange sight for visitors to the Evening Cheese Market. While the cheese carriers rushed back and forth with berries full of cheese, cheese father Willem Borst and a few other cheese carriers stood staring at the wall of the Waag building for minutes on Tuesday evening. There’s something growing there. “It is something special, I recently heard from a visitor.”
Cheese father Willem Borst is a real expert when it comes to cheese and everything related to the Alkmaar cheese market. “But I’m not a specialist in plants,” he starts right away. “What I do know is that it’s a type of fern. It grows on old walls.”
The lime in the walls would have attracted this rock plant to the Waag building. “And he likes the shade, I think,” says Borst. “This is the cool side. In the morning the sun is there. And then it goes like this”, he gestures. But he owes us the exact name of the plants.
Media partner Alkmaar Central presented the matter to the Hortus Alkmaar, where they certainly liked plants.
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“Asplenium ruta-muraria”, collection manager Sipke Gongreep responds immediately. “A wall fern. And the plant with the wider lighter fronds is tongue fern: Asplenium scolopendrium.” Cheese father Borst was therefore well placed with his ‘fern’.
But is it really special? “Certainly the wall fern is very common,” says Gongreep. “That is the plant that arrives first when a wall starts to weather a bit. Wall fern has the fewest requirements.”
And once wall fern feels at home on an old wall, other nature can also thrive. Like sole fern. “You didn’t see much tongue fern in the past,” says Gongreep. Until 2017, that plant was even protected, but that protection is no longer necessary and, according to Gongreep, the government found it difficult, such a protected plant on quay walls and the like.
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“Tongvaren mainly grew in South Limburg,” he continues. “It was too cold here, but the mild winters have ensured that sole fern is now fairly common.” However, lee is favorable for this plant, so the tongue fern on the Waag has chosen a great spot.
Both ferns are harmless, by the way. “It doesn’t matter at all for the building; these plants don’t damage the stones. That is sometimes said, but that is not true,” emphasizes the collection manager of the Hortus.
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Ferns such as tongue fern and wall fern belong to an old city like Alkmaar, according to both Sipke Gongreep and cheese father Willem Borst. “You know, that building is 600 years old,” says Borst, pointing to the Waag. “It’s just part of it.”
“They took care of that wall a few years ago, then it was gone for a while. But it’s back now and that’s great,” concludes Borst. And Gongreep agrees: “I’m always surprised that we want to keep these kinds of walls clean in the Netherlands. And the plant really can’t hurt at all.”
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