The Giant Sequoia of Parc de Woluwe

The single largest tree in Brussels by trunk girth is not native to Europe at all. This giant sequoia, measured at 8.66 metres around in 2017, thicker than any other tree recorded in the region, grows in a park that did not exist until the 1890s, when the landscape architect Emile Laine laid it out for Leopold II as a green corridor linking the 1897 World's Fair site at the Cinquantenaire to a second exhibition site at Tervuren. That makes the sequoia, at most, only a little over a century old, remarkable for how much girth a genuinely young tree can put on: giant sequoias can live two thousand years and more in their native California, and reach 50 to 60 metres even in Belgium's cooler, wetter climate. Planted as an ornamental statement piece for an international exposition rather than surviving from an older forest, it has spent barely a tenth of its natural lifespan reaching a size that would take most Belgian native species several centuries to match. The park around it now holds some 180 different tree species, and this one is, by a wide margin, the thickest of all of them.