The Park Trees of Den Brandt

Behind a castle built in 1790 that itself replaced a medieval structure destroyed centuries earlier, Den Brandt's park holds a valuable, largely uncatalogued collection of solitary trees and tree groups around an artificial pond and open lawn, laid out in the English landscape style once fashionable among Antwerp's merchant elite. The estate is first documented in 1396, when it was likely a farmstead rather than the country residence it later became, and it stayed in private hands for centuries, passing to the della Faille de Waerloos family in 1804 and then to the Kreglinger family in 1910, who bought both the castle and 16 hectares of grounds around it. The public only gained access in 1911, and today Den Brandt forms one third of the combined Nachtegalenpark alongside Middelheim and Vogelenzang. No single tree here carries a published age or circumference record in the sources checked for this entry, so none is claimed. What survives is a planting scheme old enough that Flanders' heritage inventory rates the tree population itself as valuable, an English style landscape garden whose individual specimens have simply never been measured for public record the way the specimens at nearby Hertoghepark or Rivierenhof have.