We provide a new construction of Brownian disks in terms of forests of continuous random trees equipped with nonnegative labels corresponding to distances from a distinguished point uniformly distributed on the boundary of the disk. This construction shows in particular that distances from the distinguished point evolve along the boundary as a five-dimensional Bessel bridge. As an important ingredient of our proofs, we show that the uniform measure on the boundary, as defined in the earlier work of Bettinelli and Miermont, is the limit of the suitably normalized volume measure on a small tubular neighborhood of the boundary. Our construction also yields a simple proof of the equivalence between the two definitions of the Brownian half-plane.