The Second Oriental Plane of Parc Leopold

Parc Leopold holds the thickest oriental plane in the Brussels-Capital Region. About two hundred metres away it holds the fourth. The fourth was measured at 5.14 metres round in April 2016, runs close to thirty metres tall, and carries eight metres of clean trunk before the first branch under a crown fourteen metres wide. Its celebrated neighbour spreads thirty-eight. Two trees of one species in one small park, ranked first and fourth across the whole region, which makes the extra two hundred metres worth walking. The ground was private until 1851, when the city laid the park out over the grounds of the vanished Eggevoorde manor. For the rest of the century it did double duty as a commercial horticultural garden. Jean Jules Linden, one of the great orchid importers of his age, ran his business here until he died in 1898, and the park's stock of unusual trees is what survived him. Whether this plane is one of Linden's or arrived later, nobody has established. The region added it to the legal heritage inventory in August 2024 and recorded it as healthy. That inventory is also the only place the tree is described at all, and it gives no age. If you know when it went in, tell us.