The Oriental Plane of Parc Leopold

The thickest tree of its kind anywhere in Brussels stands in a park built over a vanished stream. This oriental plane, measured at 6.48 metres around in 2023, only joined the region's legal heritage inventory in August 2024, a formal recognition that arrived roughly two centuries after the tree itself. Plane trees have marked water since antiquity, when Greeks planted them by springs and wells to shade travellers, and this one keeps the tradition without anyone intending it to: the Maelbeek stream still runs underground nearby, beneath the Chaussee d'Etterbeek, and a small tower at the foot of the park's hill once operated as a 17th century fishery pond house long before the plane tree existed. At around 33 metres tall with a crown spreading 38 metres wide, the tree now shades a park built in the 1850s around a private estate, later absorbed into the district that today surrounds the European Parliament. It is, by circumference, the largest specimen of its species in the entire Brussels-Capital Region, a two hundred year old tree standing quietly behind institutions considerably younger than it is.