The Cedar of Lebanon of Parc d'Egmont

This cedar has spent its life pretending to be a broadleaf. Instead of the single straight column its species normally builds, its trunk divides low down into two enormous limbs, one leaning out over the back gardens of the Rue du Grand Cerf, the other reaching into the wooded corner of the park, and the resulting silhouette looks far more like an old beech than a conifer. Walk up to it and the disguise fails immediately: the resin smell is unmistakable, the needles come in tight rosettes rather than singly, and the cones sit upright on the branches like small barrels with their scales pressed flat. It measures 2.98 metres around and stands at the park's boundary rather than on its lawns, half visible from the street, which is probably why it is the least photographed of the park's registered trees. Cedars of Lebanon reached western European gardens in the seventeenth century, and the estates that could afford them planted them as statements. This one has outlived the statement. The palace beside it burned in 1892 and was rebuilt, the gardens were redrawn twice, the city bought the whole thing in 1918, and the cedar carried on splitting itself in two directions.