Leuven's oldest tree was drawn before anyone measured it. A London plane in Arenbergpark appears on the late eighteenth century design for the park it still stands in, and its trunk has since reached 7.43 metres round. The rest are stranger. A black mulberry leans on the wine press house of a vanished abbey and carries a twenty metre legal protection zone of its own. Three limes gave a roadside chapel at a Wilsele crossroads its name. And out at Wijgmaal a plane sits hollow enough at the base to park a bicycle inside, probably several trees fused into one.
0 of 4 visited in Leuven
1
The Arenbergpark Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 230 to 250 years · Heverlee
This plane is on the drawing. It already appears on the late eighteenth century design for Arenbergpark, made when the Duke of Arenberg had his formal grounds recut in the English landscape style between 1775 and 1778, which is why Flanders' heritage inventory dates it, in its own careful wording, to possibly the end of the eighteenth century. Roughly 230 to 250 years is the honest reading of that, and it is an estimate off a period rather than a planting record. The register's own survey puts the trunk at 7.43 metres round at chest height and the crown at 34.5 metres across, wider than most streets in Leuven.
It stands alone, which is unusual at that size. Planes are normally avenue trees, planted in rows and squeezed into shape by their neighbours. This one had the lawn to itself and spent two centuries using it.
The castle it was laid out for belongs to KU Leuven now, and the engineering faculty works in the buildings, so the park is crossed by students all day and stays open, unfenced and free. Under either end of the register's date the tree was already mature when the German army burned the centre of Leuven in August 1914, and again when the city was bombed in May 1940. It has outlasted both.
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2
The Drie Linden Chapel Lindens
Lime (Tilia sp.) · not documented; the chapel beside them dates to the late 18th century · Wilsele
The chapel is named after the trees. Kapel Drie Linden, the chapel of the three lindens, stands on a sharp triangle of ground at a Wilsele crossroads with a lime on each flank, and it was raised in honour of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Linde, Our Lady of the Linden. Whether these three are the trees it was named for, nobody has established.
The chapel is thought to date from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, built by Dominicus Jozef Hyacint Nelis, a professor who bought the Bleydenberg estate across the road in 1773. It was damaged during the French Revolution years and reconsecrated in 1829 with a new statue of Mary. It reached the land registry only in 1865, by which time the municipality of Wilsele owned it. In 1951 a road adjustment rounded off the sharp point of the plot and brought the chapel closer to passing traffic than its builder can have intended.
The lindens themselves are recorded as Tilia and nothing further. No age, no girth, no species beyond the genus, no planting record anywhere. This is an entry you visit as one thing, a small roadside chapel with three trees standing around it. If anyone in Wilsele knows when the limes went in, we would like to hear it.
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3
The Sint-Geertrui Wine Press Mulberry
Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) · not documented · Leuven city centre
Belgium protects this mulberry the way it protects a building. A decree signed on 12 July 2010 put a twenty metre radius of legal protection around it, ground included, because the tree has grown into the corner of the former wine press house of the Sint-Geertrui abbey and the register treats the two as one thing: a mulberry that forms a unity with the protected Wijnpershuis it leans on.
The measurements explain the leaning. A survey in October 2013 recorded 244 centimetres round the trunk and only 60 centimetres of that trunk before it forks, with a crown spreading 17 metres. Black mulberry does this with age. It sags, splits low and props itself on whatever is there rather than standing upright, so an old one looks like it is going over and usually is not.
The Wijnpershuis was listed as a monument in 1938 and now houses De Wijnpers, the provincial horticulture school, which has worked on the site for over a century. A school for growers, with a legally protected mulberry leaning on the wall of its oldest building.
Nobody has dated the tree. Girth alone cannot settle it on a low, multi-stemmed species like this one, so the age field is empty rather than invented. If a Leuven record holds the year, we would like to see it.
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4
The Ymeria Bundle Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Wijgmaal (Wilsele boundary)
A bicycle rack stands inside this tree, or did when Flanders' heritage agency last reported on it. The base is hollow and roomy enough for that, and the trunk measures 9.20 metres round at chest height, which the agency calls one of the thickest planes in the country. It is probably also not one tree. The inventory records it as a bundelboom, a bundle tree: several young planes dropped into a single planting hole and left to fuse, a nineteenth century shortcut to a thick trunk without waiting a century for one. A local reading disagrees and says it was simply pollarded hard when young. The agency's own account leaves both open.
Which is why there is no age here. The usual method reads a girth against a species' growth rate and assumes one stem did the growing; several stems grown together would return a number far too old, and an invented century is worse than an empty field.
It probably stands on a filled-in arm of the Dijle that once marked the boundary between Wilsele and Wijgmaal. It has been protected as a monument since 2010. In 2015 the city and the heritage agency had its stability assessed and pruned it back as a precaution, and the report described the heavy limbs as still growing strongly.
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