The Black Locust of Hertoghepark

The thickest black locust tree recorded anywhere in Belgium grows in a small city park hemmed in by three Antwerp streets. At 4.10 metres around, measured in 2009, this robinia holds the species' national girth record in the country's own dendrological inventory, an unglamorous but real distinction for a tree species better known for lining railway embankments than for record breaking size. Hertoghepark is a fragment of the Leikwartier, a garden district laid out from 1547 by the property speculator Gilbert Van Schoonbeke on land he bought from the Van de Werve family, meant as leafy weekend retreats for Antwerp's wealthy merchant class outside the city walls. The Hertoghe and Belpaire family gardens and the old Mertens farm were later folded together into the single park that survives today, protected since 1974 as a historic cultural landscape. Black locust is not a long lived species by tree standards, rarely making it past a century and a half in good health, so this specimen's champion status says less about extreme age and more about how much room and light it found in a private garden turned public park, growing largely undisturbed while the city grew dense around it.