The Douglas Fir of the Hippodrome

The tallest tree in Brussels grows on what used to be a racecourse. This Douglas fir, standing 33 metres, took root sometime after 1875, the year the City of Brussels leased roughly 25 hectares of forest edge to the Royal Society for the Improvement of Horse Breeds, which built a hippodrome with two grandstands here by 1878. The species itself could not have grown here any earlier: Douglas fir only reached Europe from the American Pacific coast in 1827, brought back by the Scottish botanist after whom it is named, so even the oldest possible specimen anywhere in Belgium falls short of two centuries. This one, rising above a racecourse that operated for well over a century before closing to horses, has had roughly a century and a half at most to outclimb every native species around it, and its height, not its age, is the record it holds. The hippodrome grounds are now being redeveloped as a mixed public park and university site, and the tree, along with much of the surrounding tree cover, is intended to stay exactly where it is through that transition.