The Chestnut Avenue of the Cinquantenaire

When Brussels built Parc du Cinquantenaire in 1880 to mark Belgium's fiftieth year as a country, it cheated on the trees. Rather than planting saplings and waiting decades for a new park to look established, city gardeners transplanted trees that were already fully grown, moved in from the old Leopold Quarter cemetery, the Bois de la Cambre and the edge of the Sonian Forest itself. The common horse chestnuts that line one of the park's principal avenues are among the clearest survivors of that trick: mature when they arrived, they are older than the park itself by however many decades they had already grown before the move, plausibly close to two centuries old today, though no individual planting record confirms a precise figure for any single tree in the row. Around fifteen trees across the wider Cinquantenaire park made it onto Brussels' official register of remarkable trees, chestnuts among them alongside false acacias, a silver maple and a rare Italian alder, but the chestnut avenue is the one most visitors walk beneath without knowing they are standing under trees older than the triumphal arch at the park's centre.