Bagging botanical Brussels

The last time we went to Brussels, I got terribly excited that the hotel we were staying in was right next door to the Botanical Garden of Brussels. Unfortunately – as we discovered in short order – at some point in the 1930s the plants had mostly been shipped off elsewhere, leaving the garden not very botanical, and Dr Cook not very impressed.

That elsewhere was the Plantentuin Meise / Jardin Botanique Meise, which is to the north of Brussels, conveniently situated – for the purposes of this second attempt to visit them – between Brussels airport and Antwerp.

We were visiting in autumn, and they were in the middle of renovating part of their main glasshouse – the Plant Palace – but there was still plenty to see, including a good arboretum, an orchid exhibition, and some lovely Japanese beautyberries:

The entry fee (€ 7) is very reasonable, and the restaurant helpfully ensures all sandwiches come with a colonic depth-charge of salad; just the ticket to cure the faecal impaction resulting from the ‘food’ served to us on the flight out with <insert awful British airline here>. When we were there, there was also an art installation by Roos Van de Velde in praise of the best plant in the world – the maidenhair tree Ginkgo biloba – but you’ve only got until mid-January to catch it:

Botanerd highlights:

1. Whereas Kew’s evolution house (currently being renovated as part of the Temperate House restoration) always felt like a holding pen for a few cycads and ferns that didn’t physically fit into the Palm House, the Meise version was much more complete, with a good selection of horsetails, ferns, and high-quality fakes of fossil plants like Cooksonia, Lepidodendron, etc. That said, I would very much like to see these ‘evolution house’ efforts re-branded as ‘phylodiversity houses’ or similar, as the usual Scala Naturae bullshit of using modern mosses, lycopods, ferns, and conifers as stand-ins for prehistoric forms gets right up my arse.
2. The pinetum is small, but has a good selection of species, including quite a few weird cultivars of Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) that I’ve not seen before.

Previous baggings…