The Pagoda Tree of Parc d'Egmont

Brussels files this tree under a name and a nationality that are both wrong. The register lists it as Sophora japonica. Botanists moved the species to Styphnolobium some time ago and most registers have not caught up, and it was never Japanese in the first place: it is native to China and Korea, and reached Europe by way of Japanese gardens, which is how it collected an epithet that has now outlived two corrections. In China it was the tree of the imperial court, planted at palaces and tombs, and by tradition it was a pagoda tree on Coal Hill in Beijing that the last Ming emperor hanged himself from in 1644, with rebel armies already inside the city. This one is a quieter proposition. Surveyors walked Parc d'Egmont in July 2019 and entered it on the region's inventory of remarkable trees, where it ranks inside the top thirty of its species for Brussels. There are not many to rank. The pagoda tree has never been planted here in quantity, which is exactly how a specimen of no great size ends up on an official list. That survey logged one point on the lawns for the trees it added rather than a coordinate per trunk, so the pin puts you in the right corner of a park you can cross in three minutes and no closer. Nobody has recorded its age.