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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.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Parc Leopold, Rue Belliard, 1000 Brussels
You can recognise it by its huge 38 metre crown and 6.48 metre trunk, the thickest oriental plane in Brussels. It stands in Parc Leopold on Rue Belliard.
Metro to Maelbeek or Schuman, short walk
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.