Plantenpaleis (Plant Palace) of Meise Botanic Garden

The Plant Palace belongs to a garden whose history begins in 1797 in Brussels, first on the Nassau Palace grounds and later in the city's Botanical Garden. The Belgian State took over its management in 1870, and the collections reached the Bouchout estate at Meise in the late 1930s: the garden's own chronology dates the move to 1938, while an English-language reference says the final decision and the first major works date from 1937.

The glasshouse complex rose in the southern part of the estate, on Wemmel territory, between 1947 and 1958. The first design, made before the Second World War, is credited to an architect recorded as M. Cole; from 1955 James Allard and Robert Bocquet led the project. The Van Mosselaer firm carried out the building work and the Ateliers de construction de Willebroek supplied the metal profiles. The complex was inaugurated in 1958 and opened to the public in 1965.

Ageing structures later called for a long renovation campaign, which the Flemish heritage inventory dates from 1997 and the garden's own website from 1999. The tropical rainforest house reopened in August 2017, and the last two houses, a Mediterranean house and a cloud forest, opened on 1 April 2023 after about twenty years of work. Since 8 October 2021 the Flemish heritage agency has recorded the building as architectural heritage.

The Plant Palace forms a rectangular block of roughly ten thousand square metres, close to one hectare under glass. Thirteen large, interconnected glasshouses surround twenty-two smaller collection houses, and roof heights range from 8 to 16 metres. The heritage inventory stresses the variety of construction methods: timber framing, metal framing and reinforced concrete all appear. Foundations are laid on schist blocks and the lower walls are of brick, while the metal profiles came from the Willebroek workshops.

The houses are organised by biome: tropical rainforest, tropical wetlands, a subtropical rainforest with an elevated canopy walkway, deserts, savanna, mangrove and, since 2023, Mediterranean and cloud-forest zones. The cloud forest is built around an artificial rock seven metres high with several waterfalls, so that the plants draw most of their water from mist, as they do on tropical mountains around 2,500 metres. In the Mediterranean house the terraces are faced with yellow Burgundy limestone, and a fountain stone comes from the garden's former Brussels site. The number of houses varies with the source: thirteen large ones in the inventory and in most articles, fifteen in a 2023 press release from the garden.

Since the renovation, many plants grow in the ground rather than in pots. In the tropical wetland house, two giant water lilies, Victoria cruziana and the larger Victoria amazonica, are sown every February in a basin of 275,000 litres kept at 25 to 30 °C; their leaves, one to two metres across, can bear about 40 kilograms. The genus first flowered in England in 1849 and in Belgium a year later, and each flower lasts only two nights.

Among the cycads, several Encephalartos laurentianus grown from seed collected in Congo between the 1930s and 1950s have flowered since the 1990s. The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), whose inflorescence can exceed 1.5 metres, blooms rarely and only for a few days; two plants donated by Bonn Botanical Garden flowered in the summer of 2008. A heritage collection closed to visitors includes an Eastern Cape cycad, Encephalartos altensteinii, more than 300 years old and acquired between 1826 and 1842. One house deals with the human influence on plants, and another, the Evolution House, traces the history of land plants.

The palace lies in the southern part of the estate, on the Wemmel side; from the Nieuwelaan entrance the route passes through the medieval garden and the scent garden before reaching it. The garden suggests about an hour for the glasshouses, which are included in the general visit of the estate. Summer suits the giant water lilies best, and the garden holds an annual baby-photo event among their leaves; the titan arum flowers unpredictably. The visit combines easily with the Balat greenhouse in the Cronquist garden, Bouchout castle and the restaurant in the orangery overlooking the pond.