The Kentucky Coffeetree of Parc d'Egmont

In Dutch this tree is the doodsbeenderenboom, the dead men's bones tree. The name is about its winter. The Kentucky coffeetree comes into leaf later than almost anything else in a Belgian park, often not before late May, drops early in autumn, and spends the months between as a set of thick blunt grey twigs with nothing on them, which somebody once decided looked like bones. It sits on Brussels' legal register of remarkable trees at a girth of seventy three centimetres, which is nothing, and it is still the fourth largest of its kind in the region. That is a comment on Brussels rather than on this tree. Gymnocladus dioica grows wild in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, is uncommon even there, and Europe has never planted it in any quantity. The common name comes from settlers in Kentucky who roasted and ground the seeds as a coffee substitute. The roasting mattered: raw, the seeds and pods are toxic. The species is dioecious, which is what the dioica means, so male and female flowers grow on separate trees and only a female sets the heavy leathery pods. It is a young tree with a six metre crown, here for the botany rather than the spectacle, and worth two minutes on the way to the sycamore.