🌳🌲 On Baltrum, there are more trees than one might think!

There are downy birch forests (Betula pubescens), oak forests (Quercus), pine forests (Pinus), mixed forests, deciduous forests, coniferous forests – you can find spruces (Picea abies), woolly creeping willows (Salix repens) – many other willows – many sea buckthorn shrubs (Hippophae rhamnoides) and so on and so forth. Looking up, you might also spot a European mistletoe (Viscum album).

From time to time, you can also just try something… birch seeds or delicious pine cones. Exquisite! All completely natural, without car or industrial emissions! 👨‍🍳😋

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🌸🌼🪻 Baltrum has many flowers for you!

(1) Dune pansy (Viola tricolor maritima)
🌿 A maritime form of the wild pansy growing in sandy soils near the sea. I think it's the most beautiful of all the island flowers!

(2) Mouse-ear hawkweed (Hieracium pilosella)
🌿 A creeping perennial, frequent in dry grassland and sandy soils.

(3) Sea rocket (Cakile maritima)
🌿 A salt-tolerant plant of sandy beaches and dunes. A pioneer plant important in dune formation. I saw many, but only one was blooming.

(4) Narrowleaf trefoil (Lotus tenuis)
🌿 A low-growing legume with slender leaves and small yellow flowers, thriving on dry or sandy soils, including coastal grasslands.

(5) Oakes’s Evening-primrose (Oenothera oakesiana)
🌿 A coastal biennial with large yellow flowers that open in the evening, adapted to sandy dune habitats.

(6) Small bugloss (Anchusa arvensis)
🌿 A bristly annual with small bright blue flowers, typically found on sandy or disturbed ground.

(7) Sea milkwort (Lysimachia maritima)
🌿 A succulent coastal plant with fleshy leaves and pinkish-purple sepals, adapted to salty shorelines and salt marshes.

(8) Sea thrift (Armeria maritima)
🌿 A hardy coastal perennial, often found in the salt marshes.

(9) Ragged-robin (Silene flos-cuculi)
🌿 A delicate wildflower of damp meadows, with deeply cut pink petals that give it a ragged, star-like appearance.

(10) Common starwort (Stellaria graminea)
🌿 A slender wildflower, common in meadows and along paths.

(11) Honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum)
🌿 A fragrant climbing shrub often found in hedgerows and woodland edges.

(12) Yellow flag (Iris pseudacorus)
🌿 A large wetland iris with bright yellow flowers, common in marshes and along water edges.

(13) Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris)
🌿 A tall, airy umbellifer with delicate white flower clusters.

(14) Lilac (Syringa species)
🌿 There are many cultivated and hybrid forms of lilac. This one smelled really good!

📖🔍 I was able to identify the species based on its appearance, habitat and the species list of the East Frisian Islands (Niedringhaus, Haeseler, Janiesch).

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🪸 In my hand, I’m holding a piece of bladderwrack (Fucus vesiculosus), a seaweed commonly found along the Wadden Sea coast. The small, round bladders are not fruits but flotation organs. They help the seaweed stand upright in the water so its flat fronds can catch as much sunlight as possible. This is essential for photosynthesis – the process of turning light energy into nutrients.

🌊🫧 The bladders are filled with a mixture of gases. This is mainly oxygen, which the seaweed produces during photosynthesis, and nitrogen, which diffuses in from the surrounding seawater. Carbon dioxide, which the seaweed needs to grow, is almost absent because it is used up immediately. Thanks to this high oxygen content, the bladders provide enough buoyancy to keep the seaweed floating, allowing it to capture as much light as possible even at high tide or in murky waters.

🧫🔬 From a biological point of view, Fucus vesiculosus is a brown alga. It belongs to a group called the Fucales within the family Fucaceae. Even though it looks like a plant and makes its own food through photosynthesis, it is classified in a broader group called Stramenopiles, which also includes diatoms (tiny plankton) and some organisms that don’t photosynthesise at all. How exactly brown algae fit into the tree of life is still being studied, and researchers continue to discuss their relationship to other algae and to the ancestors of land plants.

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🌊🌾 The sea gives. The sea takes. It's in its nature. Wave by wave, it carries away what once was, and brings something new to shore elsewhere.

❤️‍🔥🧠 Memories settle within me too – not always willingly, not always welcome. Beautiful things buried beneath pain. Pain laced with beauty. What belongs to me mixes with what I had to let go of.

🪾🌱 I can't hold on to what is in motion. But I can acknowledge that loss also shapes. That what was taken from me creates space for something else. And that some things I thought were broken are part of something greater.

⏳️🌓 The hourglass of the tides doesn’t stand still. And while the sand trickles down, something grows beneath the surface: not the old, not the same, but something of its own.

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🌊🌾 A mere heap of sand is nothing enduring. No memory – only wind, rain, and tides carry it onward. For something to remain, it needs life that grasps it, holds it, gathers it – like the marram grass that forms the first embryonic dunes. The birth of new life, when the horizon rises and is eventually crowned with white dunes. From up there, one can see far and wide how life and death make fertile land thrive. The dunes turn grey, then brown, and the diversity of life marks each of these hills that, without an initial impulse, would never have been more than a fleeting mineral in the wind.

🌲🌳 Amid shrubs, pines, and bog birch forests, one quickly forgets that all this soil was washed ashore by the sea and carried to this place by the wind. One looks out over endless salt marshes, over reeds and the Wadden Sea, whose tidal creeks meander deep into the newly formed land. And far on the horizon, on the other side beyond the dunes, one sees a solitary hill – a warft – where humans made this world their own, found refuge, and fed their livestock on the salty meadows.

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🥰 Enjoyed until the last ray of sunshine! ✨️

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🏕🌛 I spent my vacation on Baltrum at the campsite. That way, I felt especially close to the completely car-free island. The campsite is located right in the nature reserve of the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park, surrounded by dunes and directly adjacent to the salt marshes.

⛱️ Since school holidays hadn’t started yet and I was the first camper of the year, I had the place mostly to myself. Only over the long weekend starting with Ascension Day were there a few other campers. The site belongs to the youth education center of the Lower Saxony Gymnastics Association and is managed and maintained voluntarily by its members. Many things on the site were built by the young people themselves, such as a shelter and seating areas.

🎵🐦🌳🪺🌾 During the day, you occasionally hear children playing, but at dusk and during the night, there’s no sign of people. You hear the trees rustling in the wind, the flapping of the tent canvas, and a choir of countless birds. In the morning, a pheasant crows to wake you. It's currently breeding season—around 300 different bird species are counted in the East Frisian Islands region in May. The campsite is located right between the two most important habitats: dune landscapes and salt marshes. There’s also a small stand of trees on the site, and nearby you’ll find wet meadows and moorlands. When you open your tent in the morning, the first thing you see is numerous rabbits scattering in all directions.

🦭☠️ A mysterious discovery: after the other campers had left, they left behind a skull. After a bit of research, it turned out to be a seal skull, which they most likely found on the eastern end of the island. That’s where seals spend their youth from autumn to spring.

😊 Altogether, I spent 10 nights in the tent, and the weather was mostly good. It was an extraordinary experience—definitely worth repeating!

✨ After my return home, I noticed that my senses were heightened. I perceived smells, tastes, and sounds with particular intensity.

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