Jardin Albertine / Albertine tuin

The original garden was designed for the 1910 World Fair to cover the “Montagne de la Cour” district, which was extremely neglected and in disarray at the time.

It was a terraced garden, running down from the Place Royale to the Boulevard de l’Empereur, 40 meters/130 ft below.

Today’s garden was born from the great urban planning project of the Mont des Arts, during the 1958 World Fair. It was designed by a landscape gardener, René Pechère.

The design of this garden is steeped in two great ideas.

First, to make the Mont des Arts one of the great vista points of the city, by clearing out a wide panorama including the City Hall tower as well as the Koekelberg Basilica.

Second, to give the garden structure all year long, by creating compartments bordered by edges, with flower compositions evolving with the seasons.

We are pursuing this task in collaboration with the IBGE architect and team of gardeners. The floral compositions are renewed throughout the year, to keep pace with the various blooms.

The ground being very dry and mineral, this exercise is all the more difficult and sometimes requires the use of exotic essences: for example, one can see knipophia, an African species, in the side compartments of the garden.

But this garden has another specificity: it’s a hanging garden, resting over a three-storey garage! The plane trees are planted in just 1.40 meter/4.6 ft of earth, layered over a draining layer. This is an amazing technical feat and the trees grow just as if they were deeply rooted.

[Interview with the chief gardener]

I go through the garden every night. I am a “shuttler” as they say. I rarely stop, but today, I am enjoying the sun while waiting for my train.

I’ve been through this garden so often that I know its rhythms and its different seasonal lives.

[Interview with a passer-by]

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