The Great Sycamore of Parc d'Egmont

Nobody plants a sycamore on purpose any more. It seeds itself into gutters and railway banks across Europe, grows fast, and gets cut down long before it can become anything, which is what makes the largest tree in this park worth looking up at: 32 metres of it, with a clean trunk running six metres before the first branch and a girth of 3.97 metres measured in 2026. The region's surveyors rank it the third thickest sycamore recorded anywhere in Brussels. It is also the reason the park feels bigger than its one and a half hectares. Parc d'Egmont is sealed on all four sides by buildings, the only public green space inside the old city walls with no street frontage at all, and a tree this tall pushes the sense of the place upward instead of outward. The sycamore has been in Belgium so long that most people take it for a native, though it arrived from the mountains of central Europe centuries ago and settled in as thoroughly as any local species. Its winged seeds spin down in September in numbers that would fill the whole park with seedlings if the gardeners let them.