The Millennium Ginkgo of the Stadspark

Antwerp's first public park has spent the last forty years quietly losing the very trees that made it worth designating in the first place. When the German landscape architect Eduard Keilig laid out the Stadspark in 1869 on the site of the city's demilitarised Spanish fortifications, he built it around mature tree cover that came with the land, a striking contrast of an irregular pond, an island reached by a suspension bridge and a steep grassy slope. Surveys by Belgium's own dendrological association in 1986 and 2005 both flagged the same problem: a historically significant tree population under real pressure from disease, storm damage and basic safety concerns, with large sections already removed by the time of the second survey. Rather than pretend nothing had changed, the city marked the turn of the millennium in the winter of 1999 to 2000 by planting a ginkgo, a species famous for outliving almost everything around it, as a deliberate long view gesture in a park whose 19th century originals were already disappearing. What remains is a park honest about its own losses, old fortification earthworks reshaped into a pond and hillside nearly forty years before Belgium's dendrologists started counting what the storms had taken.