The Sophora of the Abbaye de la Cambre

A Japanese pagoda tree grows in the garden of a monastery that housed Cistercian nuns for nearly six hundred years. The Abbaye de la Cambre was founded in 1201 and suppressed in 1796 during the French occupation, and while its oldest surviving stonework, the abbey church and parts of the cloister, dates to the 13th and 14th centuries, most of the garden layout around this tree is 18th century. The sophora itself is considerably younger than any of that, a species that only reached European gardens in the mid 1700s and was slower still to become a common ornamental choice, but its trunk, measured at 3.08 metres around in 2012, makes it the sixth largest of its kind recorded anywhere in the Brussels region. Light, almost feathery foliage sets it apart from the abbey's heavier, older trees, and in late summer it produces long fleshy seed pods rather than the flowers most people expect from an ornamental tree. The abbey buildings now house a school and municipal offices, but the gardens remain open to the public, free, in the middle of Ixelles.