Welcome

Arboretum Wespelaar is OPEN every Wednesday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m until November 13th included.

Practical information

Virtual Tour

Find a plant

Search for woody plants in the database of the Arboretum Wespelaar or in the BelTrees database

Search in Arboretum

Search in BelTrees

Identification keys and illustrations

By Jan De Langhe, dendrologist at Ghent University Botanical Garden, in collaboration with Arboretum Wespelaar

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Arboretum Wespelaar is OPEN every wednesday and sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., until Wednesday, November 13th included.

This SPRING LEAFLET guides you through the arboretum with information on the trees, the vistas and some history.

Links

Year Report 2023

Read our Year Report 2023 here.

All Belgian plant collections on one website!

Since 2023, all Belgian Botanical gardens and arboreta are putting their plant collections online on one single platform: botanicalcollections.be.

Our country has 26 botanical gardens and arboreta, 26 gems, each with its own collection of plants. All these gardens together hold no less than 83 000 plants belonging to 25 000 different species and varieties, well documented, and therefore invaluable for research, horticulture, garden tourism and the preservation of plant species for the future. Bringing these collections together on one clear, user-friendly platform is the purpose of botanicalcollections.be.

Gardens are often asked whether a certain plant species is present in their collection or not. Every plant lover can now find out where his favourite plant grows or browse through the collections with just a few clicks. For example, are you curious to know where you can admire giant sequoias in our country? Or the rare Wollemia nobilis? Enter a plant name on botanicalcollections.be and see in which botanical garden or arboretum you can find it. Depending on the garden and the size of the garden or arboretum, details of where exactly the plant can be found in the garden in question will also be available. For many plants, images are also available.
Besides information and location of living plants, botanicalcollections.be also contains images and label data of nearly 3 million herbarium specimens, a work in progress that also aims to bring together the country's various herbaria on one platform. Herbaria are collections of dried plants for scientific research. Botanicalcollections.be allows scientists from all over the world to view the study material online.

Bringing all data from several botanical gardens and arboreta of a country together on one portal, is a first in the world. V.B.T.A., The Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta of our country is therefore proud of this realisation, which came about with the support of the FWO (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen) within the project DiSSCo-Flanders (Distributed System of Scientific Collections). This project is part of the international trend to make important and well-documented data available to anyone who can benefit from them.

The Global Conservation Gap Analysis of Magnolia Published

We are proud to have contributed to this important research program that maps endangered Magnolias within plant collections and lists the needs to protect more than 330 Magnolia species. You can consult this publication via the BGCI website. Arboretum Wespelaar is also part of the Global Conservation Consortium for Magnolia in order to help with the conservation of endangered Magnolias.

Virtual Tour

Our “Virtual Tour” has had an update and is back online! Now also available in English (previously only Dutch and French). You’ll find the link on our homepage here above by clicking on the green button "Virtual Tour", or can use the direct link here.

You can explore the different parts of Arboretum Wespelaar through drone-taken air photographs. You can select the different parts of the Arboretum (Magnolia Meadow, Marnef Wood, etc.), see which plants are planted in which plot and read more about those plants in the left column. You’ll also find our selections mapped out, and some of our red-listed species.

Enjoy!

Red List of Acer

The Red List of Acer (revised and extended) is now available on the BGCI website. This Red List gives the conservation status of all 158 maple or Acer species. The report reveals that 1 in 5 species of Acer are threatened with extinction in the wild. The Foreword is written by Koen Camelbeke, director of Arboretum Wespelaar. Arboretum Wespelaar, which has a big collection of maples and also focuses on red-listed tree species, was one of the participating institutions in the creation of this red list. The arboretum holds a large collection of Acer images and high resolution scans by Jan De Langhe (By Jan De Langhe, dendrologist at Ghent University Botanical Garden, in collaboration with Arboretum Wespelaar), which were used in this publication.

A List of Acer names on which we all agree – Utopia or (almost) a Reality?

One plant - one name! Koen Camelbeke of Arboretum Wespelaar is trying to achieve this ultimate goal for the maples (genus Acer) together with an international team of maple experts. Want to know more? Click here for the article that appeared on the Maple Society Website.

Info

Level 4 accrediation by ArbNet renewed for Arboretum Wespelaar !