Wild plants

Heather needs plenty of sun and not too much moisture. That is why you do not see heather in the woods, nor in lower-lying and therefore generally more damp areas. When there has been a fair amount of rain in the spring, followed by a dry, sunny summer, the heather looks at its best. In wet summers, it does not fare so well. Heather is particularly popular with bees. They produce a honey with a distinctive flavour. You’ll often see beehives or hives on the heathland. Don’t get too close: bees can sting quite badly!

The heather plant does not cope well with heavy foot traffic and cannot tolerate camping at all. There are still small patches of heather on the campsite. Unfortunately, quite a lot of it gets trampled in the summer, so that almost every year a bare patch has to be reseeded with grass seed. Certain types of grass are, in fact, more resistant to trampling.

As already mentioned, the heathland used to serve a purpose in the past, namely for grazing sheep. However, it had other uses too. For instance, heather sods were used as roofing material, which can still be seen at the open-air museum in Schoonoord. Heather was also used for something else: namely, for making heather brooms.

Heather has one major drawback, and that is its high flammability. So never smoke on the heath. A single discarded cigarette butt is enough to start a heath fire that cannot be stopped. Yet heathland is sometimes set alight deliberately. This is because as a heather plant ages, it does not become any more attractive. It develops too much woody growth and flowers less. Eventually, after about seven years, the plant dies. In the past, when the heather was kept young and short by sheep grazing in the meadows, this was not a problem. Now it has become one, which is why heathland is sometimes burnt off in winter. It goes without saying that this must be done with great care. Even these controlled burns have occasionally got out of hand. Once the heather has been burnt, the heather seed – which has fallen in large quantities just below the surface and therefore has not been burnt – now has the space to germinate, so that after a year, fresh young heather has grown again. The second type of heather is the heather, also purple in colour, but with a slightly redder hue. Heather flowers are quite remarkable. They are larger than those of common heather and have a diameter of about two centimetres. When you first look at such a flower from the back, it appears to be a very ordinary little flower with about six to eight red-purple petals. But if you turn the flower over, you’re in for a big surprise, because it turns out that it isn’t a single flower at all, but around six to eight separate little flowers, each more or less shaped like an urn and clustered together at the base. In each little flower, the pistil and stamens are clearly visible.

Like common heather, cross-leaved heath prefers sunshine, so this heather is not found in the woods either. A major difference, however, is that cross-leaved heath requires plenty of moisture and therefore grows in somewhat wetter areas. Precisely because there is a great deal of variation between dry and damp areas at Westerbergen, both types of heather are found there. There are patches of ground that are just dry enough for common heather and just wet enough for cross-leaved heath, so that both species grow intermingled. This is very clearly visible on the small heathland area situated along the yellow and red walking routes. Just after the first burial mound, the routes turn left. You can now see the field in question on the right-hand side. The effect of dry or wet soil is particularly evident in the aforementioned glacial hollow, which lies in the adjacent heathland along the blue walking route. In a hollow, all the rainwater collects in the centre. Here, you can see a circular area where only heather grows. The edges of the hollow are naturally drier, so heather has appeared here. If the ground becomes too damp, even the heather cannot survive. In that case, bent grass and cotton grass appear.

It has already been mentioned that with crowberry, it is the leaves that are of interest, not the flowers; this does not mean, however, that this heather does not flower. The flowers are, however, very small and inconspicuous, brownish-red in colour, and, moreover, there are far fewer flowers per plant than with common heather. If you are not aware of this, you would hardly notice when they are in bloom, which occurs in spring, in April or May. Later in the year, dark blue berries appear, containing the seeds. These berries are a delicacy for crows, which is how the name ‘crow heather’ came about. When a bird eats a berry, it often drops the seeds a long way away, or the seeds leave the body again via droppings, and in this way the seeds can be spread far and wide. If they land in a favourable spot, the seeds can germinate and new plants will grow. We will encounter this method of seed dispersal more often, as with the rowan, the wild cherry, the juniper and many others.

Heather is found on Westerbergen near the burial mounds, where several patches are visible. A particularly beautiful patch of heathland, rich in heather, lies to the left of the red walking route, just before it turns right, running parallel to the railway line and then continuing for a stretch through the meadows.
 

It is very tempting to pick flowering broom branches and put them in a vase. However, this is strictly forbidden! This is because broom is a protected plant in Drenthe. Besides, there is no point in picking them, as the flowers wilt very quickly once picked. The same applies to all other wild flowers: they are much more beautiful in the wild than in a vase.

The next plant to be discussed is the fireweed. It is particularly common in the bungalow area and on the heathland bordering Westerbergen. These are eye-catching plants, usually with a single stem that rises straight up and towers above everything else, as these stems can grow to a metre or more in height. Attached to the stem at regular intervals are narrow, tapering leaves, which are often ten centimetres long and only about two centimetres wide. The leaves closely resemble willow leaves, hence the name willowherb. The flowers, a soft red colour, appear on the top thirty centimetres of the stem. Many of them emerge from a single stem, and it is precisely this way of flowering that makes the willowherbs stand out. The lowest flowers open first. By the time they wilt, the flowers above them appear, and this continues right up to the top. Consequently, the flowering period is long. The first flowers appear around the beginning of July, but some are still in bloom by the end of September. At that time, only the top four flowers are visible. In the middle of summer, the entire sequence can be clearly seen on a single plant. One must then look from top to bottom. At the top, the flowers are still in bud; below that are a number in full bloom, followed by a few wilted and faded ones, and below those again are the fruits. These fruits are long, thin tubes and are usually red in colour. When these fruits burst open, the seeds emerge, each equipped with a long seed pappus. Thanks to this tuft, the seeds can be spread quite far. In autumn, the leaves wither and much of the seed tuft remains clinging to the plant in tangled strands, so that it looks less attractive. We now come to the cotton grass, also known as bog moss or, in the Drenthe dialect, ‘vennepluus’, although this is actually a slightly different plant; however, the names are often used interchangeably. This time, the focus is not on the inflorescence, but on the seed fluff. In May and early June, the seed fluff appears at the very top of the stem; it looks like a little white ball of wool and actually feels like wool too. Cotton grass requires a great deal of moisture. It doesn’t quite grow in the water, but it does grow on the boggy edges of ponds or on patches within the pond that are in the process of becoming overgrown. At Westerbergen, the main gathering place for cotton grass is the large fen. Standing at the edge of the fen, the woolly tufts are clearly distinguishable on the nearest plants, but further away they appear as white dots everywhere. If there are many clustered together and they can be seen from a greater distance, a very peculiar effect can arise. It then looks as if there is a small field of snow. This can

be seen very clearly almost every year at the fen situated in the Echtener sand. The edges and immediate surroundings of this fen are very marshy, making this area an ideal growing site for cotton grass.

Last but not least is the blackberry, disliked by many yet loved by just as many others. Among the former are those who have pricked themselves on its many sharp thorns; among the latter are those who have tasted its delicious fruit. The blackberry belongs to the same plant family as the rose, and this kinship is clearly evident in its sharp thorns. The leaves of the rose and the blackberry also resemble one another. The leaves of the blackberry are somewhat larger and are, as they say, pentapetalous, which means that each leaf appears to consist of five leaflets, with two pairs of leaflets opposite one another and the fifth leaflet at the tip. The blackberry bush remains low to the ground. The stems can form an enormous tangle. The white, rather unspectacular flowers appear in mid-summer. Once they have finished flowering, the fruits appear, which, like the entire plant, are called blackberries. At first they are green in colour, then red, but gradually they turn purple-red to black. That is when it is time to pick the blackberries. They are a real treat.

Blackberries are found everywhere in the bungalow area, especially near bungalow 162. They are also found in various places in the woods, for example just behind the staff accommodation and along the overgrown section of the Markeweg, to the west of the campsite.

At Westerbergen itself, most blackberries are picked too early. They are then not tasty and have a sour flavour. However, there are plenty in the surrounding area along paths that are not too heavily trodden.

This text is taken from the booklet ‘The Origins of Westerbergen’, compiled by Dr E.J. Offerhaus