The Red Oak of Parc d'Egmont

Brussels Environment's own walking route through this park gives up on describing this tree and simply says that in autumn you will notice it before you read the sign. That is fair. The northern red oak turns a deep scarlet that no European oak can produce, holds it for a couple of weeks in October, and does it here about a month before the ginkgo thirty metres away goes gold, so the same clearing performs twice in one season. The tree measures 3.42 metres around and reaches 24 metres, with a crown eighteen metres across. Its leaves are the easiest identification in the park: broad, thin, with bristle tipped points at the end of every lobe, nothing like the rounded lobes of the pedunculate oaks Belgium grows natively. It comes from eastern North America, where it is a forest tree rather than a park specimen, and it arrived in European gardens in the eighteenth century as a novelty that grew faster than anything local. Faster growth is also why it has never reached the age of a real veteran oak here, and why it is a middle aged tree that already looks substantial.