The Silver Maple and Pagoda Tree of Place Jean Jacobs

Two of the region's registered trees stand about twelve metres apart in this square, and both of them were re-measured in the second week of September 2026. The thicker is a silver maple: 2.77 metres round, twenty-one metres tall, a crown fourteen metres wide over six metres of clean trunk. The tape found eleven centimetres more than the figure the register had been carrying, which is a decade of ordinary growth turning up in a file. It ranks thirty-second of its species across the Brussels-Capital Region. The Japanese pagoda tree beside it is slimmer at 2.22 metres and three metres shorter, and it holds the wider crown of the two at sixteen metres. That one ranks sixteenth of its kind regionally. They make a good pair because they are nothing alike. The silver maple is a North American river-bottom tree whose leaves are white on the underside, so the whole crown flickers pale when wind gets into it. The pagoda tree came out of China despite the Japan in its name, reached European gardens in the eighteenth century, and is one of the last trees in the city to flower, holding cream blossom into late summer when the rest have finished. Place Jean Jacobs is a small open square between the Sablon and the Palace of Justice, and both trees stand centrally in it, in plain view from the street. Neither has been dated, and neither appears anywhere outside the region's own inventory.