The Pyramidal Holly of Parc d'Egmont

Holly is a hedge in most of Brussels, and a sprig on a card in December. Left uncut it becomes a tree, and this is what that looks like: a trunk 1.40 metres round on the western lawns of Parc d'Egmont, which the region's inventory of remarkable trees ranks as the second largest of its cultivar anywhere in Brussels. The cultivar is 'Pyramidalis', a narrow, upright selection of the common European holly. A cultivar is not something that turns up in a wood and comes back true from seed. Every 'Pyramidalis' is a cutting of a cutting of one original plant, so this tree and the ones standing in gardens elsewhere in Europe are the same individual, grown on in different soil. Holly lays down wood very slowly, which is the whole reason 140 centimetres earns a place on an official register while the sycamore on the same lawn carries 397 centimetres and ranks only third of its kind. Nobody has dated this one and the register does not try. It measures, it ranks, and it leaves the years alone. If you know the park's planting records, we would take the correction. The park signposts it on its own panel, which spares you the hunt: at a distance a holly this size still reads as a shrub, right up until you are close enough to see the trunk.