So today on the summer solstice, in Amsterdam the sun will be above the horizon for 16 hours, 48 minutes and 28 seconds – meaning effectively about 18-1/2 hours of daylight or twilight in the sky. Long days mean lots of sun for the plants to grow fast and furious. We’ve just had (last weekend) Amsterdam’s Open Garden Days, showcasing some of that lovely growth. I visited this year for the first time (managing only about 10 of the 25 gardens), and assembled more than enough lovely photos to merit a special series which we’ll be sharing over the coming five days. These ten posts will share glimpses of what are truly Urban Gardens at their peak in the northern summer. This particular series began in May 2020, while I was on lockdown in Bangladesh without regularly-scheduled airline passenger service for many months, trying to walk and enjoy the covid-quieter city by way of outdoor and work-life balance. Mostly, I’ve shared in this series photos of parks, container gardens or plant vendors such as in that first post more than three years ago. But for the coming days, you’ll see true gardens, many of them private (like this one), some at museums, and all behind the houses and thus not visible to casual passersby. Enjoy 🙂
Buiksloterbreek Park, in a part of Noord Amsterdam that I hadn’t previously visited. (In case you’d like an orientation linked to past posts: north of the Ij, to the right and in this case further west i.e. farther away from where these photos from Muziekgebouw and Bimhuis were taken.)
Sometimes an urban canal may look like a country canal – but as with our last entry in this series, note the high-rises in the background…and I think we we’re in the city limits of A’dam at this point on the bike path :-).
An early Saturday at the skate park in the North-Holland village of Uitgeest, where to my delight, the two youths using the bumps and jumps of the park were girls, not the usual gangs of teenage boys one’s come to expect :-).
Though this may look idyllically countryside-esque, I think we’re within the city limits of Amsterdam on the bike path along the Amstel; note the high-rise office buildings of (I believe) Bijlmer in the background behind the more-picturesque windmill.
(so much world, so little time....) 