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.
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Getting there
Jardins de l'Abbaye de la Cambre, Avenue Emile Duray, 1050 Ixelles, Brussels
You can recognise it by its light, feathery foliage and long fleshy seed pods in late summer, on a 3.08 metre trunk. It stands in the gardens of the Abbaye de la Cambre.
Tram to Abbaye or Bois de la Cambre stop
In bloom
August, when it is one of the last trees in the city to flower
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
