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Description
...the orchid-beechforests of Lower Saxony in Germany in spring.

Every year in springtime when nature in northern Germany inside the so called "Lower Saxony Hills" awakes little by little, I every year say anew: What a luck that we can experience here in our forests during April and May such extraordinarily beautiful flowers mostly covering whole the ground of the forest.
You cannot find it everywhere in the big forest areas in Lower Saxony, because we have also in a lot of parts of our hills acid soil conditions, and there you mostly have not any plants at ground level.

The very beautiful forests with a great abundance of flowers grow on so called Limstone-soils. Therefore the scientists call them Limestone-Beechforests. In some parts of Lower Saxony forestry replaced the beechforests with coniferious forests in the 60-80th of 20th century - nowadays nature gives a brutal answer to this very bad only economically motivated political decision - gone against better knowledge ! But in the prodominatally part of the forests beech remained as the dominating tree because of its main importance for all kinds of classical furniture production.

When most of the spring-geophyts (like anemone, corydalis, cowslip, etc.) are faded, you have a period in which the orchids are growing up and in some places dominate the picture of the forest floor...
...Walking through those parts of the forests you sometimes think that you are in paradise....the photo shows a typical aspect of the ridge-trail of "Külf" - the additional photos at the bottom are showing flower-aspects beside this trail.

Location of the foto: Ridge-trail (in German "Kammweg") des "Külf" (one of the hills of so called "Leine-Bergland" - "Lower Saxony Hills") - Lower Saxony (member state of Germany) - Germany - Europe - 06.05.2022

Additional photos showing the orchid-aspect of this forest: Aspect with Orchis mascula (Stately orchid - Stattliches Knabenkraut).

Description
...the orchid-beechforests of Lower Saxony in Germany in spring.

Every year in springtime when nature in northern Germany inside the so called "Lower Saxony Hills" awakes little by little, I every year say anew: What a luck that we can experience here in our forests during April and May such extraordinarily beautiful flowers mostly covering whole the ground of the forest.
You cannot find it everywhere in the big forest areas in Lower Saxony, because we have also in a lot of parts of our hills acid soil conditions, and there you mostly have not any plants at ground level.

The very beautiful forests with a great abundance of flowers grow on so called Limstone-soils. Therefore the scientists call them Limestone-Beechforests. In some parts of Lower Saxony forestry replaced the beechforests with coniferious forests in the 60-80th of 20th century - nowadays nature gives a brutal answer to this very bad only economically motivated political decision - gone against better knowledge ! But in the prodominatally part of the forests beech remained as the dominating tree because of its main importance for all kinds of classical furniture production.

When most of the spring-geophyts (like anemone, corydalis, cowslip, etc.) are faded, you have a period in which the orchids are growing up and in some places dominate the picture of the forest floor...
...Walking through those parts of the forests you sometimes think that you are in paradise....the photo shows a typical aspect of the ridge-trail of "Külf" - the additional photos at the bottom are showing flower-aspects beside this trail.

Location of the foto: Ridge-trail (in German "Kammweg") des "Külf" (one of the hills of so called "Leine-Bergland" - "Lower Saxony Hills") - Lower Saxony (member state of Germany) - Germany - Europe - 06.05.2022

Additional photos showing the orchid-aspect of this forest: Aspect with Orchis mascula (Stately orchid - Stattliches Knabenkraut).