The Pond Oaks and Beeches of the Bois de la Cambre

Brussels' most fashionable park is also a fragment of a forest older than the city walls that once surrounded it. When Leopold II's landscapers carved the Bois de la Cambre out of the northern edge of the Sonian Forest in 1861 and 1862, connecting it to the city centre by the new Avenue Louise, they left much of the existing tree cover standing rather than replanting from scratch. Around its ponds today grow pedunculate oaks, beeches, wild cherries and Austrian black pines old enough that more than eighty of them made Brussels' own official inventory of remarkable trees, from a park of 124 hectares. None of these individual pond side trees carries a documented planting date of its own, so no single age is claimed here, only that they are old growth remnants of a much larger woodland. The Sonian Forest continues south from this same tree line, and a separate, strictly protected 270 hectare section of it further out was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017 for its ancient beech stands, a reminder of what this park was cut from rather than a claim about this particular corner of it.