The Turner's Oak of Parc d'Egmont

Every register starts somewhere, and Brussels started here. When the region opened its scientific inventory of remarkable trees, this squat evergreen oak was the first entry made, in 1999, ahead of every giant sequoia and four hundred year old oak that has been added since. It earned the place without being old or tall. It stands ten metres high and spreads its crown seventeen metres wide, a shape that reads more like a parasol than a tree, and its trunk is 2.90 metres around, second thickest of its kind in the whole region. Turner's oak is a garden invention rather than a wild species, a cross between the common pedunculate oak and the Mediterranean holm oak raised in an Essex nursery and named after the nurseryman who raised it. It kept the southern parent's leathery leaves, so it stays green through a Brussels winter and only goes briefly bare in spring when the new growth pushes the old leaves off, the reverse of every other oak around it. The landscape architect Edmond Galoppin most likely planted it when he remade these palace gardens as an English park in 1901. A second, taller Turner's oak grows a few minutes away on the same lawns.