The Second Turner's Oak of Parc d'Egmont

Parc d'Egmont has two Turner's oaks, and the region's own tree atlas has spent years quietly mixing up their measurements. This is the taller and thicker of the pair, 264 centimetres around and 23 metres high, against the other tree's 10 metres. Both are the same garden hybrid, bred in an English nursery by crossing the common pedunculate oak with the evergreen Mediterranean holm oak, which is why both keep their leathery leaves through a Brussels winter and only drop them briefly in spring when new growth pushes the old ones off. Brussels region's inventory of remarkable trees lists this one as the third thickest of its kind anywhere in the region, ranked by an official survey rather than a guess. No planting date survives for it specifically, though the palace grounds around it were remade as an English landscape park in 1901 by Edmond Galoppin, the likely era for both oaks even without a record naming either one. The two trees stand a few minutes' walk apart on the same lawns, which makes them an easy pair to see together: the smaller, older-registered oak near the palace railings, this taller one closer to the Passage de Milan gate.