The Pedunculate Oak of Mont des Arts

The Mont des Arts garden is not what it looks like: a formal, two-hectare terrace of clipped yew and box hedges offering one of the best panoramic views over central Brussels, it is actually a roof, built in 1957 to 1958 over an underground car park, designed by the Belgian landscape architect Rene Pechere as what the profession calls a suspended garden. This pedunculate oak, girthed at 166 centimetres and legally inscribed on the region's official remarkable-trees register, grows in that engineered ground between the Royal Library and the Avenue des Arts. The site's own history goes back further than the garden itself: an earlier version was laid out for the 1910 World's Fair to hide, in the words of its own French landscape architect Jules Vacherot, the shabby state of the hillside beneath a cloak of greenery and flowers. What stands today is the second attempt at the same idea, decades later and considerably more ambitious. Brussels' official inventory records the oak's girth and legal status without a planting date, so the tree's age is undocumented rather than estimated. It grows in the open, free, on one of the city's most photographed viewpoints.