The Thornless Honey Locust of Parc d'Egmont

The inermis on this tree's register entry means unarmed, and it is doing a lot of work. A wild honey locust grows branched spikes straight out of its own trunk, up to twenty centimetres long and hard enough to go through a tyre, which is why the thornless form is the only one anybody puts in a city park. The usual explanation for those spikes is that they are about thirteen thousand years out of date. They are sized for animals that no longer exist, the giant ground sloths and mastodons that browsed North American woodland until the end of the last ice age, ate the tree's long twisted pods for the sweet pulp inside and carried the seed off in their guts. The pods still drop every autumn. Now they rot where they land. Surveyors entered this specimen on the region's inventory of remarkable trees after a pass through Parc d'Egmont in July 2019, and it sits inside the top thirty of its species for Brussels. None of the three trees that survey added is big: the thickest of them measures 164 centimetres round. The survey gave one coordinate for the group instead of a pin per tree, so the exact spot inside the park is not on record. Look for the finest leaves in Egmont, leaflets small enough that the shade under a honey locust is barely shade. Nobody has dated it.