The Tulip Tree of Parc d'Egmont

In autumn 2018 a Brussels art institute adopted this tree. The ISELP, whose building stands a few streets away, chose the tulip tree of Parc d'Egmont as the living centrepiece of an exhibition called A Forest, on the argument that a monument you can walk around, in a park that joins the upper and lower city, does something a gallery wall cannot: it makes a passerby slow down. The tree is a good candidate for the job. It is 3.06 metres around and twenty seven metres tall, the only specimen on this list the region's surveyors record as being in outright good health, and it carries the strangest leaf in the park, cut off flat at the tip as though someone had trimmed it with scissors. Its flowers are the reason for the name and the reason most people miss them: greenish yellow, tulip shaped, and produced high in the crown in June, where they sit above eye level until a storm drops one on the path. Europeans wanted this American tree so badly in the eighteenth century that its seeds were smuggled. Three hundred years later the enthusiasm has come back around, in the form of an art exhibition.