The European Beech of Parc Leopold

The famous tree in Parc Leopold is a plane. The tallest one is not. This European beech reaches about thirty-four metres, above the great oriental plane on the other side of the park, and it does it on a trunk of 4.09 metres with almost ten metres of clean bole below the first branch. The girth was taken on the leap day of February 2016. Across the Brussels-Capital Region that measurement ranks it forty-sixth of its species, which says more about how many large beeches Belgium has than about this tree. Height is its argument instead. A crown twenty metres across sits on top of that long trunk, in a group of fewer than five trees, on ground the European Quarter has closed in on from every side. The park was laid out in 1851 over a vanished manor estate; the institutions arrived a century later, and the beech now grows in the middle of them, a few steps from the Parliament and invisible from any road. It joined the region's legal heritage inventory in August 2024, with only minor defects recorded against it. Nobody has put an age to it, and no survey outside the region's own inventory has written it up. The trunk is there to be measured, and the answer is somebody's to send us.