About us

BotanicalJourneys was created by Rutger Barendse (Belgium) and Jeroen Willemsen (The Netherlands) because of their mutual hobby: finding as many wild flower species as possible in a certain area and taking pictures of the wild flowers. For many years, Rutger and Jeroen plan once or twice each year a trip to a specific area and write down all the plants they find. Sometimes they use the reports of colleague-botanists. The data that is collected, is registered at www.observado.org most of the times, in order to provide information on wild plant species to others.

Jeroen lives south of Rotterdam in The Netherlands. He is not only interested in searching wild flowers but also in research on mammals (mainly bats and mice). He is a member of the Field Study Group of the Dutch Mammal Society and also studied marine flora and fauna at the Dutch Stichting Anemoon. He works for a water company and has a Master's degree in Cultural Sciences. Jeroen wrote his Bachelor's thesis on a comparison of nineteenth-century civil society in the Netherlands and Belgium by focusing on the foundation of national botanical associations.

Rutger was born in the Netherlands and nowadays lives with his wife and 4 sons in the Province of Limburg, Belgium. He has his own small company for biodiversity research. As a volunteer administrator on waarnemingen.be and observado.org he is responsible for checking photographs and maintaining the species-lists of European plants. He has a website on plants in the Belgian region 'Campine' and is CEO of the company ODI biodiversiteitsonderzoek.