Brussels is the rare city that has kept a formal, scientific register of its own remarkable trees since 2002, cataloguing more than a thousand specimens by age, rarity and historical weight. That bureaucratic thoroughness is why ages and girths on this list are unusually exact. It also explains an odd trick the city played on itself: when Brussels built the Cinquantenaire park in 1880 for Belgium's fiftieth anniversary, it did not plant saplings. It transplanted fully grown trees from an old cemetery and the edge of the Sonian Forest, so the new park looked centuries old on its opening day.
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1
The Chene Josephine
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · close to 400 years · Forest
Brussels' own heritage inventory calls this oak probably the oldest tree of any kind in the entire region, and its evidence is a single number: 6.05 metres around the trunk, measured at chest height. That circumference translates, through standard oak growth tables, to an age close to four hundred years, since no planting record exists for a tree this old growing in what was once simply called the Kersbeekbosch, a wood already named in a document from 1648, a full century before anyone thought to record individual trees within it. A 20th century industrialist built a chateau and pleasure pavilion on the land and renamed it Parc des Eperons d'Or, but the commune of Forest only acquired the grounds in 1979 and opened them to the public in 1980, as Parc Jacques Brel. The oak, already three and a half centuries old by then, barely noticed the paperwork. At roughly 20 metres tall with a canopy shaped by centuries of unhurried growth, it now shares its park with joggers, a playground and Brussels' newer housing developments, a working class commune's public oak older than most of the buildings standing around it put together.
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Foto: Geert Van der Linden / Flanders Immovable Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0)
2
The Kasterlinde
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 200+ years · Berchem-Sainte-Agathe / Molenbeek-Saint-Jean border
A single lime tree marks the exact spot where three Brussels communes meet, and it has been doing the job since at least 1777, when the Ferraris map, the first detailed survey of the Austrian Netherlands, recorded it at the boundary point of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, Berchem-Sainte-Agathe and Dilbeek. Later maps track it by name: an 1821 survey shows it beside a chapel demolished that same decade, and an 1858 map of Brussels and its surroundings labels the spot simply Kaster Linde. Its trunk has thickened from 2.75 metres around in the early 1900s, when the Belgian botanist Chalon first measured it for his book on the country's trees, to 3.15 metres today, growth that puts its real age comfortably past two centuries even before the documentary trail is counted. A street and a nearby cafe, In de Linde, both take their name from it. Unlike a garden specimen chosen for its looks, this tree exists because generations of surveyors needed a fixed point that would not move, and a slow growing lime, marking a boundary since before Belgium existed as a country, turned out to be exactly that.
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Foto: Ben2~commonswiki (CC BY-SA 3.0)
3
The Oriental Plane of Parc Leopold
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 200 years · European Quarter
The thickest tree of its kind anywhere in Brussels stands in a park built over a vanished stream. This oriental plane, measured at 6.48 metres around in 2023, only joined the region's legal heritage inventory in August 2024, a formal recognition that arrived roughly two centuries after the tree itself. Plane trees have marked water since antiquity, when Greeks planted them by springs and wells to shade travellers, and this one keeps the tradition without anyone intending it to: the Maelbeek stream still runs underground nearby, beneath the Chaussee d'Etterbeek, and a small tower at the foot of the park's hill once operated as a 17th century fishery pond house long before the plane tree existed. At around 33 metres tall with a crown spreading 38 metres wide, the tree now shades a park built in the 1850s around a private estate, later absorbed into the district that today surrounds the European Parliament. It is, by circumference, the largest specimen of its species in the entire Brussels-Capital Region, a two hundred year old tree standing quietly behind institutions considerably younger than it is.
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Foto: GdML (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4
The Pond Oaks and Beeches of the Bois de la Cambre
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · old growth, undated · Ixelles / Uccle border
Brussels' most fashionable park is also a fragment of a forest older than the city walls that once surrounded it. When Leopold II's landscapers carved the Bois de la Cambre out of the northern edge of the Sonian Forest in 1861 and 1862, connecting it to the city centre by the new Avenue Louise, they left much of the existing tree cover standing rather than replanting from scratch. Around its ponds today grow pedunculate oaks, beeches, wild cherries and Austrian black pines old enough that more than eighty of them made Brussels' own official inventory of remarkable trees, from a park of 124 hectares. None of these individual pond side trees carries a documented planting date of its own, so no single age is claimed here, only that they are old growth remnants of a much larger woodland: the Sonian Forest continues south from this same tree line, and a separate, strictly protected 270 hectare section of it further out was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017 for its ancient beech stands, a reminder of what this park was cut from rather than a claim about this particular corner of it.
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5
The Giant Sequoia of Parc de Woluwe
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 125-135 years · Woluwe-Saint-Pierre
The single largest tree in Brussels by trunk girth is not native to Europe at all. This giant sequoia, measured at 8.66 metres around in 2017, thicker than any other tree recorded in the region, grows in a park that did not exist until the 1890s, when the landscape architect Emile Laine laid it out for Leopold II as a green corridor linking the 1897 World's Fair site at the Cinquantenaire to a second exhibition site at Tervuren. That makes the sequoia, at most, only a little over a century old, remarkable for how much girth a genuinely young tree can put on: giant sequoias can live two thousand years and more in their native California, and reach 50 to 60 metres even in Belgium's cooler, wetter climate. Planted as an ornamental statement piece for an international exposition rather than surviving from an older forest, it has spent barely a tenth of its natural lifespan reaching a size that would take most Belgian native species several centuries to match. The park around it now holds some 180 different tree species, and this one is, by a wide margin, the thickest of all of them.
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6
The Purple Beech of Parc Tournay-Solvay
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 150-200 years · Watermael-Boitsfort
Alfred Solvay, brother of the industrial chemist Ernest Solvay, built a country manor at the edge of the Sonian Forest in 1878, and the park around it still carries his family's name today. His daughter Therese Tournay-Solvay later expanded the grounds, and in the early 20th century the landscape architect Jules Buyssens redesigned them into the layout that survives now, mixing exotic plantings with remnants of the original forest vegetation. Among the survivors is a purple beech, its almost black red foliage a deliberate contrast against the ordinary green beeches nearby, part of a group of large trees in the park old enough that several, this one included, appear in the official inventory of the Brussels region's natural heritage. No source gives this specific tree an individual age, only that trees of its kind in the park run from roughly a century and a half to two centuries old, a range wide enough to be honest rather than precise. The park sits directly against the edge of the Sonian Forest in Watermael-Boitsfort, free to enter, and considerably quieter than Brussels' larger, better known green spaces.
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7
The Douglas Fir of the Hippodrome
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · up to 150 years · Watermael-Boitsfort
The tallest tree in Brussels grows on what used to be a racecourse. This Douglas fir, standing 33 metres, took root sometime after 1875, the year the City of Brussels leased roughly 25 hectares of forest edge to the Royal Society for the Improvement of Horse Breeds, which built a hippodrome with two grandstands here by 1878. The species itself could not have grown here any earlier: Douglas fir only reached Europe from the American Pacific coast in 1827, brought back by the Scottish botanist after whom it is named, so even the oldest possible specimen anywhere in Belgium falls short of two centuries. This one, rising above a racecourse that operated for well over a century before closing to horses, has had roughly a century and a half at most to outclimb every native species around it, and its height, not its age, is the record it holds. The hippodrome grounds are now being redeveloped as a mixed public park and university site, and the tree, along with much of the surrounding tree cover, is intended to stay exactly where it is through that transition.
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8
The Sophora of the Abbaye de la Cambre
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · unknown, mature · Ixelles
A Japanese pagoda tree grows in the garden of a monastery that housed Cistercian nuns for nearly six hundred years. The Abbaye de la Cambre was founded in 1201 and suppressed in 1796 during the French occupation, and while its oldest surviving stonework, the abbey church and parts of the cloister, dates to the 13th and 14th centuries, most of the garden layout around this tree is 18th century. The sophora itself is considerably younger than any of that, a species that only reached European gardens in the mid 1700s and was slower still to become a common ornamental choice, but its trunk, measured at 3.08 metres around in 2012, makes it the sixth largest of its kind recorded anywhere in the Brussels region. Light, almost feathery foliage sets it apart from the abbey's heavier, older trees, and in late summer it produces long fleshy seed pods rather than the flowers most people expect from an ornamental tree. The abbey buildings now house a school and municipal offices, but the gardens remain open to the public, free, in the middle of Ixelles.
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9
The Black Mulberry of the Botanical Garden
Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) · possibly 200 years · Saint-Josse-ten-Noode
A mulberry tree possibly older than Belgium itself grows in a garden that predates the country by four years. The State Botanical Garden of Brussels opened on this site in 1826, on a 6.4 hectare terraced plot at the corner of what is now Rue Royale and the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique, and this black mulberry, its trunk over two metres around, is old enough that it plausibly dates to those original 1820s plantings, though no surviving record names its exact planting year. Black mulberry is a Mediterranean species, slow to fruit and famous for staining anything beneath it a deep purple black when its berries drop in late summer, a domestic habit that made it a fixture of European monastery and manor gardens for centuries before this one arrived in a public botanical collection. The garden itself stopped functioning as a working scientific collection decades ago and is now a public park known simply as Le Botanique, its 19th century glasshouse repurposed as a concert venue, but the trees planted for research have stayed exactly where the botanists left them.
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Foto: Sam.Donvil (CC BY-SA 4.0)
10
The Chestnut Avenue of the Cinquantenaire
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · possibly close to 200 years · European Quarter / Etterbeek
When Brussels built Parc du Cinquantenaire in 1880 to mark Belgium's fiftieth year as a country, it cheated on the trees. Rather than planting saplings and waiting decades for a new park to look established, city gardeners transplanted trees that were already fully grown, moved in from the old Leopold Quarter cemetery, the Bois de la Cambre and the edge of the Sonian Forest itself. The common horse chestnuts that line one of the park's principal avenues are among the clearest survivors of that trick: mature when they arrived, they are older than the park itself by however many decades they had already grown before the move, plausibly close to two centuries old today, though no individual planting record confirms a precise figure for any single tree in the row. Around fifteen trees across the wider Cinquantenaire park made it onto Brussels' official register of remarkable trees, chestnuts among them alongside false acacias, a silver maple and a rare Italian alder, but the chestnut avenue is the one most visitors walk beneath without knowing they are standing under trees older than the triumphal arch at the park's centre.
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11
The Turner's Oak of Parc d'Egmont
Turner's Oak (Quercus x turneri) · around 125 years · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
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.
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12
The Ginkgo of Parc d'Egmont
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · around 120 years · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
This ginkgo is being slowly harmed by people who like it. It is the seventh thickest of its species recorded anywhere in the Brussels region, 3.27 metres around and twenty metres tall, and it stands on open grass in the only public park inside the old city walls that sits entirely in the middle of a block, invisible from every street around it. That makes it the obvious place to lie down on a warm afternoon, and enough people have lain under this particular tree that the soil over its roots is packed hard, which is why the region's surveyors record its condition as slightly defective despite it being, for a ginkgo, extremely young. Ginkgos are the last survivors of a lineage that was already ancient when the first flowering plants appeared, and they are famous for shrugging off pollution, disease and radiation. Compacted ground is the one thing they do not shrug off. The reward for keeping a couple of metres back is in November, when the fan shaped leaves turn a uniform butter gold and then let go almost all at once, laying a circle of yellow on the grass. A walnut across the lawn turns at the same time, so the whole clearing goes yellow together.
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13
The Tulip Tree of Parc d'Egmont
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · around 120 years · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
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.
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14
The Great Sycamore of Parc d'Egmont
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · 120-190 years · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
Nobody plants a sycamore on purpose any more. It seeds itself into gutters and railway banks across Europe, grows fast, and gets cut down long before it can become anything, which is what makes the largest tree in this park worth looking up at: 32 metres of it, with a clean trunk running six metres before the first branch and a girth of 3.97 metres measured in 2026. The region's surveyors rank it the third thickest sycamore recorded anywhere in Brussels. It is also the reason the park feels bigger than its one and a half hectares. Parc d'Egmont is sealed on all four sides by buildings, the only public green space inside the old city walls with no street frontage at all, and a tree this tall pushes the sense of the place upward instead of outward. The sycamore has been in Belgium so long that most people take it for a native, though it arrived from the mountains of central Europe centuries ago and settled in as thoroughly as any local species. Its winged seeds spin down in September in numbers that would fill the whole park with seedlings if the gardeners let them.
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15
The Cedar of Lebanon of Parc d'Egmont
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · 120-160 years · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
This cedar has spent its life pretending to be a broadleaf. Instead of the single straight column its species normally builds, its trunk divides low down into two enormous limbs, one leaning out over the back gardens of the Rue du Grand Cerf, the other reaching into the wooded corner of the park, and the resulting silhouette looks far more like an old beech than a conifer. Walk up to it and the disguise fails immediately: the resin smell is unmistakable, the needles come in tight rosettes rather than singly, and the cones sit upright on the branches like small barrels with their scales pressed flat. It measures 2.98 metres around and stands at the park's boundary rather than on its lawns, half visible from the street, which is probably why it is the least photographed of the park's registered trees. Cedars of Lebanon reached western European gardens in the seventeenth century, and the estates that could afford them planted them as statements. This one has outlived the statement. The palace beside it burned in 1892 and was rebuilt, the gardens were redrawn twice, the city bought the whole thing in 1918, and the cedar carried on splitting itself in two directions.
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16
The Red Oak of Parc d'Egmont
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · around 120 years · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
Brussels Environment's own walking route through this park gives up on describing this tree and simply says that in autumn you will notice it before you read the sign. That is fair. The northern red oak turns a deep scarlet that no European oak can produce, holds it for a couple of weeks in October, and does it here about a month before the ginkgo thirty metres away goes gold, so the same clearing performs twice in one season. The tree measures 3.42 metres around and reaches 24 metres, with a crown eighteen metres across. Its leaves are the easiest identification in the park: broad, thin, with bristle tipped points at the end of every lobe, nothing like the rounded lobes of the pedunculate oaks Belgium grows natively. It comes from eastern North America, where it is a forest tree rather than a park specimen, and it arrived in European gardens in the eighteenth century as a novelty that grew faster than anything local. Faster growth is also why it has never reached the age of a real veteran oak here, and why it is a middle aged tree that already looks substantial.
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17
The London Plane of Parc d'Egmont
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
The second thickest tree in this park ranks ninety eighth of its species across Brussels, which says more about the city than about the tree. The region has measured so many big London planes that a trunk 3.67 metres round barely places, and this one still holds a crown twenty metres wide over the Egmont lawns with only the great sycamore beating it for girth.
The London plane is a hybrid nobody planned. An oriental plane and an American plane crossed in a European garden in the seventeenth century and produced a tree tougher than either parent, which went on to line more streets than anything else on the continent. It tolerates compacted roots, drought and filthy air, and it sheds its bark in plates, which is the habit that keeps it looking clean in a city that is not.
The setting is the odd part. Parc d'Egmont is a hectare and a half boxed in on every side by the buildings of the Sablon, entered through passages rather than gates, which is how a tree this size stands five minutes from the Avenue Louise and stays unknown to people who shop there weekly.
Brussels' legal inventory records the girth and the crown for this one, and, unusually for a register this thorough, no height at all.
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18
The Horse Chestnut of Parc d'Egmont
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · not documented · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
The horse chestnut is one of the most planted trees in Europe and one of the rarest in the wild. Its entire natural range is a scatter of mountain ravines in northern Greece, Albania and North Macedonia, a few thousand trees in gorges, out of which sixteenth century collectors carried it to Istanbul, then to Vienna, then to everywhere. Conkers turned it into a children's institution across a continent; the wild population is small enough to be listed as threatened.
This one is 3.08 metres round with a crown fifteen metres across, on lawns closed in on all sides by the buildings of the Sablon. Brussels ranks it ninetieth of its species in the region, which for a tree this common is a respectable place to sit.
Being planted everywhere has cost it. Since the 1990s the horse chestnut leaf miner has spread across Europe, a moth whose larvae tunnel the leaves until they brown and curl by August, so most chestnuts on the continent now look half dead two months before autumn without actually being ill. Bleeding canker is the serious one, and the one that kills.
The flowers go up like white candles in May. The conkers come down in late September, which is the only fortnight of the year anybody looks at the ground under this tree.
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19
The Oriental Plane of Parc d'Egmont
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · not documented · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
Seventy metres separate this tree from its own hybrid offspring. The oriental plane is one of the two parents of the London plane, and both grow in Parc d'Egmont within sight of each other, the parent 2.72 metres round and the descendant 3.67, which is roughly how that cross behaves everywhere: faster, tougher, thicker than the tree it came from.
Platanus orientalis is the plane of the eastern Mediterranean, the tree of Greek market squares and Persian gardens, the species Hippocrates is said to have taught under on Kos and the one Xerxes reportedly stopped his army to hang with gold. It differs from its descendant in the leaf, cut far more deeply into narrow lobes, and in temperament: it wants water and warmth, and grows slowly when it does not get them.
This one stands twenty two metres with a crown twelve metres across, and the park's own information panel names it, which most of the 582 trees on the region's legal inventory never get. Brussels ranks it twenty first of its species.
The regional champion is a kilometre and a half east in Parc Leopold, the thickest oriental plane recorded anywhere in the city, which is a fair reason to walk between the two.
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20
The Kentucky Coffeetree of Parc d'Egmont
Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioica) · not documented · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
In Dutch this tree is the doodsbeenderenboom, the dead men's bones tree. The name is about its winter. The Kentucky coffeetree comes into leaf later than almost anything else in a Belgian park, often not before late May, drops early in autumn, and spends the months between as a set of thick blunt grey twigs with nothing on them, which somebody once decided looked like bones.
It sits on Brussels' legal register of remarkable trees at a girth of seventy three centimetres, which is nothing, and it is still the fourth largest of its kind in the region. That is a comment on Brussels rather than on this tree. Gymnocladus dioica grows wild in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, is uncommon even there, and Europe has never planted it in any quantity.
The common name comes from settlers in Kentucky who roasted and ground the seeds as a coffee substitute. The roasting mattered: raw, the seeds and pods are toxic. The species is dioecious, which is what the dioica means, so male and female flowers grow on separate trees and only a female sets the heavy leathery pods.
It is a young tree with a six metre crown, here for the botany rather than the spectacle, and worth two minutes on the way to the sycamore.
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21
The Second Turner's Oak of Parc d'Egmont
Turner's Oak (Quercus x turneri) · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
Parc d'Egmont has two Turner's oaks, and the region's own tree atlas has spent years quietly mixing up their measurements. This is the taller and thicker of the pair, 264 centimetres around and 23 metres high, against the other tree's 10 metres. Both are the same garden hybrid, bred in an English nursery by crossing the common pedunculate oak with the evergreen Mediterranean holm oak, which is why both keep their leathery leaves through a Brussels winter and only drop them briefly in spring when new growth pushes the old ones off.
Brussels region's inventory of remarkable trees lists this one as the third thickest of its kind anywhere in the region, ranked by an official survey rather than a guess. No planting date survives for it specifically, though the palace grounds around it were remade as an English landscape park in 1901 by Edmond Galoppin, the likely era for both oaks even without a record naming either one.
The two trees stand a few minutes' walk apart on the same lawns, which makes them an easy pair to see together: the smaller, older-registered oak near the palace railings, this taller one closer to the Passage de Milan gate.
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22
The White Mulberries of the Passage de Milan Gate
White Mulberry (Morus alba) · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
A pair of white mulberries flanks the Passage de Milan gate into Parc d'Egmont, one on each side, thick enough that the region's own tree inventory ranks the pair among the eighth-thickest of their species anywhere in Brussels. White mulberry is a different tree from the black mulberry Brussels already protects at the Botanical Garden: paler bark, sweeter and blander fruit, and a species grown across Europe for centuries not for eating but for its leaves, the only food silkworms will reliably take.
Neither tree has a documented planting date. What is certain is the pair itself, planted close enough to read as a matched set marking an entrance rather than as two unrelated trees that happened to end up near each other, and a trunk girth of 130 centimetres each that puts them well past a garden sapling's age.
Mulberries fruit in July, dark and staining when ripe, and a public park pair like this one rarely gets to keep its harvest: birds strip a mulberry fast. Free, on the same lawns as the park's two Turner's oaks and its ginkgo.
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23
The Turkish Hazel of the Grand Sablon
Turkish Hazel (Corylus colurna) · roughly 75 to 150 years, judged from a trunk 2.08 m round · Sablon
The Grand Sablon is better known for its antiques market and its chocolate shops than for a tree, which is exactly why the Turkish hazel standing in it is easy to walk past. The region's official inventory of remarkable trees ranks it eleventh of its species anywhere in Brussels, 17 metres tall with a 16 metre crown and a trunk 208 centimetres around, recorded as fully healthy and holding, in the register's own words, a central position in the square's landscape.
Turkish hazel is the one hazel that grows as a proper tree rather than a multi-stemmed shrub, with a straight trunk and a tidy, pyramidal crown that made it a favourite for European city squares long before anyone thought to protect individual specimens. It flowers in late winter, small and easy to miss, and carries its nuts through summer inside a spiky husk that looks nothing like a supermarket hazelnut.
Only the official register documents this specific tree so far, which is stated here rather than smoothed over. What the register gives is precise and consistent (rank, dimensions, a health check), which is a different kind of confidence than a second written source, and one this page is honest about.
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The Pedunculate Oak of Mont des Arts
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 50 to 125 years, judged from a trunk 1.66 m round · Mont des Arts
The Mont des Arts garden is not what it looks like: a formal, two-hectare terrace of clipped yew and box hedges offering one of the best panoramic views over central Brussels, it is actually a roof, built in 1957 to 1958 over an underground car park, designed by the Belgian landscape architect Rene Pechere as what the profession calls a suspended garden. This pedunculate oak, girthed at 166 centimetres and legally inscribed on the region's official remarkable-trees register, grows in that engineered ground between the Royal Library and the Avenue des Arts.
The site's own history goes back further than the garden itself: an earlier version was laid out for the 1910 World's Fair to hide, in the words of its own French landscape architect Jules Vacherot, the shabby state of the hillside beneath a cloak of greenery and flowers. What stands today is the second attempt at the same idea, decades later and considerably more ambitious. Brussels' official inventory records the oak's girth and legal status without a planting date, so the tree's age is undocumented rather than estimated. It grows in the open, free, on one of the city's most photographed viewpoints.
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The Ailanthus of Mont des Arts
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · Mont des Arts
Most cities that have a Tree of Heaven at all have one nobody planted, since Ailanthus altissima spreads through cracked pavement and vacant lots so readily that it is treated as a weed across much of Europe and North America. This one is different: girthed at 321 centimetres, one of the widest trunks on this whole list, and formally inscribed on the region's legal register of remarkable trees, a species usually pulled out on sight given a rare pass because of its size and standing.
It grows near the Mont des Arts, the raised garden terrace between Brussels' upper and lower town, built over an underground car park in the 1950s on a site that has carried some form of ornamental greenery since the 1910 World's Fair. Ailanthus was imported to Europe from China in the 18th century as an ornamental curiosity and a potential silk-moth host before anyone anticipated how aggressively it would naturalise; a specimen this large and this old getting protected status rather than removed is the exception rather than the rule. It stands free, in the open, a short walk from the garden's oak and its Caucasian wingnut.
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26
The Caucasian Wingnut of Mont des Arts
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · Mont des Arts
Caucasian wingnut takes its name from what it does with its seeds rather than what it looks like: long, pendulous strings of winged fruit that hang from the branches through late summer, an unmistakable trait for a tree most visitors would otherwise mistake for an oversized walnut. Native to the forests of the western Caucasus, it reached European gardens in the early 19th century as one of many exotic imports that formal city gardens across the continent competed to acquire.
This specimen, girthed at 173 centimetres with a 13 metre crown, is legally inscribed on Brussels' official register of remarkable trees and grows near the Mont des Arts, the raised terrace garden between the city's upper and lower halves, built over an underground car park in the 1950s. The species suckers readily from its roots, often forming small groves rather than single trunks in the wild, though this one is recorded and protected as an individual specimen. It stands in the open, free, on a short walk that also takes in the garden's oak and its far larger ailanthus.
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27
The Pyramidal Holly of Parc d'Egmont
Pyramidal Holly (Ilex aquifolium 'Pyramidalis') · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
Holly is a hedge in most of Brussels, and a sprig on a card in December. Left uncut it becomes a tree, and this is what that looks like: a trunk 1.40 metres round on the western lawns of Parc d'Egmont, which the region's inventory of remarkable trees ranks as the second largest of its cultivar anywhere in Brussels.
The cultivar is 'Pyramidalis', a narrow, upright selection of the common European holly. A cultivar is not something that turns up in a wood and comes back true from seed. Every 'Pyramidalis' is a cutting of a cutting of one original plant, so this tree and the ones standing in gardens elsewhere in Europe are the same individual, grown on in different soil.
Holly lays down wood very slowly, which is the whole reason 140 centimetres earns a place on an official register while the sycamore on the same lawn carries 397 centimetres and ranks only third of its kind. Nobody has dated this one and the register does not try. It measures, it ranks, and it leaves the years alone. If you know the park's planting records, we would take the correction.
The park signposts it on its own panel, which spares you the hunt: at a distance a holly this size still reads as a shrub, right up until you are close enough to see the trunk.
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The Pagoda Tree of Parc d'Egmont
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
Brussels files this tree under a name and a nationality that are both wrong. The register lists it as Sophora japonica. Botanists moved the species to Styphnolobium some time ago and most registers have not caught up, and it was never Japanese in the first place: it is native to China and Korea, and reached Europe by way of Japanese gardens, which is how it collected an epithet that has now outlived two corrections.
In China it was the tree of the imperial court, planted at palaces and tombs, and by tradition it was a pagoda tree on Coal Hill in Beijing that the last Ming emperor hanged himself from in 1644, with rebel armies already inside the city.
This one is a quieter proposition. Surveyors walked Parc d'Egmont in July 2019 and entered it on the region's inventory of remarkable trees, where it ranks inside the top thirty of its species for Brussels. There are not many to rank. The pagoda tree has never been planted here in quantity, which is exactly how a specimen of no great size ends up on an official list.
That survey logged one point on the lawns for the trees it added rather than a coordinate per trunk, so the pin puts you in the right corner of a park you can cross in three minutes and no closer. Nobody has recorded its age.
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The Weeping Ash of Parc d'Egmont
Weeping Ash (Fraxinus excelsior 'Pendula') · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
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.
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The Thornless Honey Locust of Parc d'Egmont
Thornless Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis) · Sablon / Bruxelles-Ville
A wild honey locust grows thorns hard enough to go through a tyre. Some are twenty centimetres long and branched like antlers. The usual explanation is that they are about thirteen thousand years out of date, sized for the giant ground sloths and mastodons that browsed North American woodland until the end of the last ice age, ate the tree's long twisted pods for the sweet pulp inside and carried the seed off in their guts. The pods still drop every autumn. Now they rot where they land.
This tree has none of it. The inermis on its register entry means unarmed, and the thornless form is the only one anybody puts in a city park.
Surveyors added this specimen to the region's inventory of remarkable trees after a pass through Parc d'Egmont in July 2019, and it sits inside the top thirty of its species for Brussels. None of the three trees that survey added is big: the thickest measures 164 centimetres round.
The survey gave one coordinate for the group instead of a pin per tree, so the exact spot inside the park is not on record. Look for the finest leaves in Egmont, leaflets small enough that the shade under a honey locust is barely shade. Nobody has dated it.
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The Tree of Heaven of the Grand Sablon
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · Sablon
Ailanthus altissima is the tree cities usually spend money removing. It seeds itself into cracked pavement and abandoned lots, grows a metre a year and is treated as an aggressive invasive species across most of Europe. Brussels has done the opposite: its regional heritage inventory has listed this one as a protected monument, and put it on the Grand Sablon, the square where the city sells its antiques.
The trunk measures 3.42 metres round, the ninth thickest Ailanthus recorded anywhere in the Brussels region, rising about 19 metres with roughly 9 metres of clean trunk before the crown opens. It shares its stretch of paving with two registered neighbours a few paces away, a common horse chestnut (2.74 metres round) and a Caucasian lime (2.04 metres round), so the square carries three legally protected trees within a spot small enough to take in from one bench.
No planting date survives for any of the three, and nothing beyond the region's own inventory has been found describing this specimen individually, so treat its history as the register states it rather than as settled fact. What is not in doubt is the square it stands on: cobbled, lined with antique dealers and restaurant terraces, one of the most expensive addresses in the city, and home to the tree most of Europe tries to pull out.
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The Second Oriental Plane of Parc Leopold
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · not documented · European Quarter
Parc Leopold holds the thickest oriental plane in the Brussels-Capital Region. About two hundred metres away it holds the fourth.
The fourth was measured at 5.14 metres round in April 2016, runs close to thirty metres tall, and carries eight metres of clean trunk before the first branch under a crown fourteen metres wide. Its celebrated neighbour spreads thirty-eight. Two trees of one species in one small park, ranked first and fourth across the whole region, which makes the extra two hundred metres worth walking.
The ground was private until 1851, when the city laid the park out over the grounds of the vanished Eggevoorde manor. For the rest of the century it did double duty as a commercial horticultural garden. Jean Jules Linden, one of the great orchid importers of his age, ran his business here until he died in 1898, and the park's stock of unusual trees is what survived him. Whether this plane is one of Linden's or arrived later, nobody has established.
The region added it to the legal heritage inventory in August 2024 and recorded it as healthy. That inventory is also the only place the tree is described at all, and it gives no age. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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The European Beech of Parc Leopold
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · not documented · European Quarter
The famous tree in Parc Leopold is a plane. The tallest one is not.
This European beech reaches about thirty-four metres, above the great oriental plane on the other side of the park, and it does it on a trunk of 4.09 metres with almost ten metres of clean bole below the first branch. The girth was taken on the leap day of February 2016. Across the Brussels-Capital Region that measurement ranks it forty-sixth of its species, which says more about how many large beeches Belgium has than about this tree.
Height is its argument instead. A crown twenty metres across sits on top of that long trunk, in a group of fewer than five trees, on ground the European Quarter has closed in on from every side. The park was laid out in 1851 over a vanished manor estate; the institutions arrived a century later, and the beech now grows in the middle of them, a few steps from the Parliament and invisible from any road. It joined the region's legal heritage inventory in August 2024, with only minor defects recorded against it.
Nobody has put an age to it, and no survey outside the region's own inventory has written it up. The trunk is there to be measured, and the answer is somebody's to send us.
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The Great Beech of the Solbosch Woods
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · not documented · Ixelles / Solbosch
Of every European beech in the Brussels-Capital Region, only six are thicker than this one.
It stands beside the Chemin de l'Aube, a footpath through the Solbosch woods at the northern end of the Bois de la Cambre, roughly six hundred metres from the ponds where the park's better known old trees gather. Measured in February 2021, the trunk came to 5.10 metres round, on nine metres of clean bole under a crown nineteen metres wide, and the region recorded it as healthy when it took the tree onto the legal heritage list in August 2024. The beech in Parc Leopold across town is nine metres taller and a full metre thinner.
The wood is older than the park attached to it. Leopold II's landscapers cut the Bois de la Cambre out of the northern edge of the Sonian Forest in 1861 and 1862 and left much of the existing tree cover where it stood, so walking north from the ponds takes you off the designed park and into what the forest kept. In late October the whole wood turns and this crown turns with it, copper over the path.
Nobody has dated this beech, and the regional inventory that lists it is the only place it appears. If you know more about it than the register does, tell us.
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The Silver Maple and Pagoda Tree of Place Jean Jacobs
Silver Maple and Japanese Pagoda Tree (Acer saccharinum, Styphnolobium japonicum) · not documented · Marolles / Pentagon
Two of the region's registered trees stand about twelve metres apart in this square, and both of them were re-measured in the second week of September 2026.
The thicker is a silver maple: 2.77 metres round, twenty-one metres tall, a crown fourteen metres wide over six metres of clean trunk. The tape found eleven centimetres more than the figure the register had been carrying, which is a decade of ordinary growth turning up in a file. It ranks thirty-second of its species across the Brussels-Capital Region. The Japanese pagoda tree beside it is slimmer at 2.22 metres and three metres shorter, and it holds the wider crown of the two at sixteen metres. That one ranks sixteenth of its kind regionally.
They make a good pair because they are nothing alike. The silver maple is a North American river-bottom tree whose leaves are white on the underside, so the whole crown flickers pale when wind gets into it. The pagoda tree came out of China despite the Japan in its name, reached European gardens in the eighteenth century, and is one of the last trees in the city to flower, holding cream blossom into late summer when the rest have finished.
Place Jean Jacobs is a small open square between the Sablon and the Palace of Justice, and both trees stand centrally in it, in plain view from the street. Neither has been dated, and neither appears anywhere outside the region's own inventory.
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