The Weeping Ash of Parc d'Egmont

A weeping ash has no top of its own. The weeping habit is a mutation that will not throw a leading shoot, so these trees are almost always grafted onto the head of an ordinary ash stem: the trunk rises as far as the grafter's join and then stops, and everything above it falls back down in a dome. Find the change in the bark somewhere around head height and you are looking at the seam between two different plants. This one grows on the lawns of Parc d'Egmont and went onto the region's inventory of remarkable trees after a survey in July 2019. It ranks inside the top thirty of its kind recorded in Brussels. The species underneath the graft is having a bad century. Ash dieback, a fungus out of east Asia, has worked its way across Belgium over the past fifteen years and killed ash trees at a rate European forestry has no answer to. Nobody can promise what that means for this one, which is an argument for going to look at it rather than against. The July survey logged a single coordinate for the trees it added rather than one per trunk, so the pin marks the group and not this stem. No age is recorded, here or anywhere: the inventory measures and ranks, and lets the years alone.