The Ymeria Bundle Plane

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.