Utrechtse Heuvelrug

About a week ago I went to the national park Utrechtse Heuvelrug with my boyfriend and our cameras. He lives in the nearby city Utrecht so it was close to home. I really like long walks in nature (even if we don't have that much of it in the Netherlands) because it's calming and relaxing. My family is much involved in nature and biology - my uncle works with birds and my grandparents live in the middle of the woods and enjoy their peace very much. Since I was interested in it from a very young age I know a lot about different kinds of plants, their (healing or nutritional) properties and animals.

To start with - it is the season of flowers! Here are a couple:

Blooming blackberry

Datura

Buttercup

Wild rose with bumblebee

Green is my favorite colour. There are so many shades of them in the forest! In the morning it was really lovely weather.

Sun shining through the leaves of the beech tree.

The forest was really, really beautiful. The diversity of plants and animals amazes me every time.

Mossy tree stump with a fern growing out of it.

Forests, and even trees, are amazing eco systems. There are millions of animals, plants, fungi, moss and algae living under, in and on a living tree, most of them help to keep it healthy. If it dies, like the tree above, other living beings profit from it as well, like these beautiful fungi. Can you see the holes made by woodpeckers?

My boyfriend took this picture of me under an amazing red beech. 

Look at all these different shades!

In the afternoon the weather started to get bad. But before we left we could not resist taking some pictures of these grassy fields.

Surprise! It's not just grass, even though I really like the blooming grass as well.

Pretty flowers. The yellow ones are called hawkbits and they're very common in the Netherlands.

Nature makes me happy!