The London Plane of Parc d'Egmont

The second thickest tree in this park ranks ninety eighth of its species across Brussels, which says more about the city than about the tree. The region has measured so many big London planes that a trunk 3.67 metres round barely places, and this one still holds a crown twenty metres wide over the Egmont lawns with only the great sycamore beating it for girth. The London plane is a hybrid nobody planned. An oriental plane and an American plane crossed in a European garden in the seventeenth century and produced a tree tougher than either parent, which went on to line more streets than anything else on the continent. It tolerates compacted roots, drought and filthy air, and it sheds its bark in plates, which is the habit that keeps it looking clean in a city that is not. The setting is the odd part. Parc d'Egmont is a hectare and a half boxed in on every side by the buildings of the Sablon, entered through passages rather than gates, which is how a tree this size stands five minutes from the Avenue Louise and stays unknown to people who shop there weekly. Brussels' legal inventory records the girth and the crown for this one, and, unusually for a register this thorough, no height at all.