Here are the locations and stories connected to the most recent 'Where the Hell is BobWalks?' Sunday FB post challenge.
Dikke Eugène, Groenendaal Arboretum
Sunday 19/08/25
Planted in the last years of the 19th century, when the Arboretum of Groenendaal was still a bold experiment in forestry, the Canadian Poplar known as Dikke Eugène grew into one of the most recognisable trees of the Forêt de Soignes. Nobody remembers quite when the nickname began, but it stuck — a nod to his massive girth, over six metres around, and the way he stood with the quiet authority of an old village mayor.
The arboretum itself was part of a grand plan: Leopold II’s drive to fill these hills with the world’s trees, testing whatwould thrive in Belgian soil. Poplars were fast, generous growers, and Eugène wasted no time in making himself indispensable to the skyline, his straight trunk and silver-green leaves marking the change of seasons for more than a century.
In 2011, a storm took him. The fall was not a slow dying, but a single, decisive moment — a crack, a thud, and the end of an era. Where he had stood is now open sky, yet the trunk still lies where it fell, softening into the grass, becoming once again part of the forest floor.
People still stop when they see it. Not for the grandeur he once had, but for what he represents — how even the tallest and thickest among us eventually yield, and how memory holds a shape long after the wood is gone. Poplars are relatively fast growing, so the wood is less dense and decomposes much more quickly than an oak or a beech - this is why there is surprisingly little left after just 14 years. That and souvenir hunters.
Gaillemarde
Sunday 12/08/25
The lane is quiet now, only the slow hiss of wind in the trees by the Ferme de la Ramée and the muffled hooves from the nearby stables along the Rue de Warché and the common meadows. Yet a stone by the verge recalls another story — rough-hewn, grey with lichen, the letters fading but the name still clear.
Alphonse Semal.
16th September, 1905.He was twenty-four, perhaps, or twenty-five — old enough to know the rules of the village, young enough to test them. She was the gamekeeper’s daughter, her eyes quick, her voice carrying across the yard when she laughed. He called for her when her father was away, walked her along the edge of the wood, made her laugh about stories from places beyond Gaillemarde.
But that afternoon, the father came home early. A shout, a movement, the hard crack of a shotgun. Later he would say it was an accident, that nature’s call had drawn him into the hedge with the gun under his arm. The court believed him, but Gaillemarde did not. He left soon after, the lane’s silence following him.
The Silver Stream flows nearby, by sedge, rush and bramble. It neither pauses nor hurries, carrying silt, leaves, and memory. The years take Alphonse’s story as the water takes fallen twigs — pushing them on, softening their edges, sending them on their way. Life’s passage and the stream’s passage are much the same: both flow on, yet both leave traces for those who know where to look. And the girl who lost both a father and a lover? They say she can still be heard calling, by the banks of the Silver Stream.