The Great Beech of the Solbosch Woods

Of every European beech in the Brussels-Capital Region, only six are thicker than this one. It stands beside the Chemin de l'Aube, a footpath through the Solbosch woods at the northern end of the Bois de la Cambre, roughly six hundred metres from the ponds where the park's better known old trees gather. Measured in February 2021, the trunk came to 5.10 metres round, on nine metres of clean bole under a crown nineteen metres wide, and the region recorded it as healthy when it took the tree onto the legal heritage list in August 2024. The beech in Parc Leopold across town is nine metres taller and a full metre thinner. The wood is older than the park attached to it. Leopold II's landscapers cut the Bois de la Cambre out of the northern edge of the Sonian Forest in 1861 and 1862 and left much of the existing tree cover where it stood, so walking north from the ponds takes you off the designed park and into what the forest kept. In late October the whole wood turns and this crown turns with it, copper over the path. Nobody has dated this beech, and the regional inventory that lists it is the only place it appears. If you know more about it than the register does, tell us.