Street Trees of Seattle

Introduction

Eighty percent of the nation’s population lives in urban areas and spends 93 percent of their time indoors. In the early part of the worldwide quarantine of 2020, while searching for new ways of being and feeling, I found myself taking epic walks and attempting to learn about trees. Since I was young, I equated horticultural knowledge with authority, the right to belong to a place, something I’ve always craved as a first-generation Seattleite. On my walks, I soon discovered that having a mission—to look for a specific tree species—forced me to develop a different relationship with time and to have unexpected conversations with familiar surroundings. It was as if a portal to a new dimension had opened, transforming the city I thought I already knew. The rejuvenating quality of “forest bathing”—the practice of immersing oneself in nature—gets a lot of attention, but what of our urban forest, the unsung “street tree”?
 
Seattle has over 730 different kinds of street trees across more than 150 different genera—one of the most diverse collections in the country, with a community of street trees more than double the diversity of the average community of street trees on the East Coast and triple the diversity of those in the Midwest. Street trees are commonly understood to be trees growing in a planting strip on a sidewalk (the city broadens the definition by also including trees in the public “right-of-way” or growing approximately 10 feet from the curb in the absence of sidewalks). In the 1970s, 40 percent of Seattle was shaded by our urban forest, but roughly forty years later, that tree canopy had shrunk to 28 percent. Street trees make up nearly a quarter of the city’s remaining tree cover, with the majority of our canopy existing on private residential property. During the global pandemic, for many, walking became the only connection to the outdoors, and street trees were our closest contact to nature.
 
For me, identifying street trees is about making contact with a place. I had recently returned to Seattle after 15 years on the East Coast, and I found my hometown unrecognizable. Sense of place had not been considered in new development, and much of Seattle now appeared uniform, without identity or past. Street trees appeared to be one of the few anchors in these changing times, inextricably linked to location and connected to a shared public memory.
 
This was not the first time Seattle was made unrecognizable. Seattle is one of the fastest-growing US cities of the early 21st century, and while it’s also one of the youngest, relatively speaking, it has undergone some of the most radical physical changes. Massive evergreens dominate our native forests, but 72 percent of our urban tree canopy is deciduous, and less than 5 percent is actually native to King County. Most of the trees we see today are nonnatives, and the oldest are 150 years at most.
 
The irony of the Emerald City in the Evergreen State is that its namesake greenery was largely clear-cut: In less than a month after arriving on the shores of West Seattle in 1852, the first European settlers felled and hauled 256 pilings of wood. Henry Yesler began operating a steam-powered sawmill the following year in present-day Pioneer Square, and the rest is history. The last original tree in the downtown area was logged in 1879. By 1910, Washington was the nation’s largest lumber-producing state, and the industry employed almost two-thirds of the state’s wage earners. In the present day, the only remaining stands of original, untouched old-growth trees in Seattle are in parts of Schmitz and Seward Parks (with isolated specimens here and there). Solastalgia itself—the distress caused by losing one’s environmental sense of place—is perhaps our strongest tie to understanding our shared history.
 
***
 
Since the Garden of Eden, there have been trees in private spaces. Trees were some of the first places of worship across all spiritualities and religions, far before temples. People have planted trees in cities for over 400 years, but the concept of planting trees en masse expressly for public spaces began only in the 16th century—in France, where imposing Lombardy poplars made popular by private Italian Renaissance gardens were planted in rows along a national system of royal post roads, creating the perception of a uniform identity across separate regions. The use of the word boulevard to mean “a tree-lined street” can be traced to one specific location in Paris atop the remains of the city’s ramparts or “bulwarks” near the old Porte Saint-Antoine gate in the 4th arrondissement. Planting trees reflected power, authority, and resources. (In response, during the French Revolution, sometimes mobs protested against aristocratic rule by planting trees in public squares.)
 
In colonial America, a haphazard street tree style developed as early as 1686, in which individual homeowners would plant trees in front of their houses regardless of whatever their neighbors may have planted. The result was a hodgepodge of random trees on a single street, an appropriate reflection of the American ethos of independence and individuality. This lack of organized tree planting was seen as a failing of American cities in comparison to European cities, where street trees were the responsibility of municipalities. But, as the United States was formed and the nation grew, so did its concept of street trees. Washington, DC, the first town to be designed by the federal government, was planned by French-born architect Pierre L’Enfant in 1791, with avenues of street trees modeled after those leading to the palace at Versailles—and it was one of Thomas Jefferson’s first tasks as president to plant Lombardy poplars along Pennsylvania Avenue in 1803. In 1872, that city would become the first in the United States to implement a comprehensive street tree-planting program, the same year Arbor Day was established.
 
Around the same time, a belief was developing that proper places created proper behaviors and that nature encouraged moral virtue and civic pride in otherwise wretched urban populations, and so the model of a green “City Beautiful” gained popularity in the wake of vaunted public green spaces like New York City’s Central Park. Planting street trees took on a class agenda. It was an act of public good defined by the wealthy for the benefit of the poor. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, as the practice of street tree planting spread across the world, trees always came as part of a package that included Western forms of paving, transportation, sanitation, and education.
 
Seattle’s own urban street tree planting began in earnest in the 1900s, fueled by the desire to be a major city following in the steps of the City Beautiful movement. Surges in street tree planting coincided with events that brought visitors to the city, including the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909 and, later, the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. The city’s official street tree data goes back to 1950 with just 800 trees listed by 1966. Ironically, most street trees were added thanks to the construction of federally funded highways. In 1968, one year before Interstate 5 was completed in Washington, bonds were issued for “arterial-street beautification,” which allowed for 17,000 street trees to be added throughout the 1970s (although about 300–400 were vandalized each year, according to the city arborist).
 
Seattle’s relationship with individual tree species and street trees over the decades reveals quirky reports of civic engagement and tangled intentions (detailed in the following pages). In 1976, a citizen went as far as suing Seattle City Light over what the Seattle Times described as the city’s “inaction concerning the plight of street trees,” resulting in a task force being appointed to work on city ordinances regarding trees. “Street trees do more to enhance the city than any piece of sculpture,” the plaintiff argued. “You need to preserve what is culturally strong in a nation, or devastation can result.”
 
Almost 50 years later, with legal protections still hotly debated, only one thing is clear: our associations with the humble street tree are uniquely complex. The urban forest occupies a weird place between our concept of what is private and public. Street trees are a reflection of modern life’s evolving ambiguities and the way we view them has always been as much about humans as the trees themselves.
 
***
 
Street Trees of Seattle is based on a data set published in 2020 by the Seattle Department of Transportation’s Urban Forestry team, which includes seven decades of information about more than 170,000 publicly and privately maintained trees considered to be in the public “right-of-way.” The collection of trees curated for this book represent a moment in time, but they are also part of a fast-evolving narrative, a real-time performance. Street trees live shorter, tougher lives than their wilder counterparts, and as we press forward, these trees will grow and change, and some will inevitably vanish.
 
A 1991 survey of street trees in 20 cities established that 13 years was the average life span of an inner-city street tree, but the “average” city is not Seattle. Most of the trees curated for this book are far older, survivors defying probability, monuments to resilience. Large trees that have taken decades to grow provide roughly ten times the human wellbeing benefits of smaller ones —and retaining and maintaining the big trees we already have is cheaper and more efficient at reducing atmospheric CO2 than any man-made solution, yet we still view them as disposable and replaceable. In the time I was researching this book since the pandemic first began, we lost several notable street trees, including Seattle’s widest (by trunk diameter) maple, ash, and black locust. The iconic flowering cherry street trees that once lined Pike St. welcoming visitors to the oldest consistently operating public market in the country were unceremoniously cut down to make way for a newly designed sidewalk. The absence of a tree is as much a part of this story as its existence. In this period of uncertainty, trees comfort and ground, reminding us that we are intertwined with the past, and the future was and has always been unknown.
 


Sample neighborhood & tree opener:
Bryant          
Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria)

Ties between the monkey puzzle tree and the Pacific Northwest go back as far as the tree’s introduction outside its native Chile. In 1792, Captain George Vancouver led an expedition to explore North America’s Pacific coast, and on the voyage back to Great Britain, he and his crew stopped in Chile, where they were served edible seeds from an unusual looking tree. The ship’s botanist, Archibald Menzies, pocketed some of the seeds and grew them during the trip home, which is how he introduced five young saplings to Britain in 1795, along with the crew’s other findings from the Pacific Northwest territory, forever associating the monkey puzzle with this region.

In Seattle, the earliest mention of this odd evergreen in the Seattle Daily Times is in 1925, when a listing advertised a 10-foot-high tree that could be purchased for $5 (about $85 today). By 1960, the cost of a monkey puzzle tree in Seattle was advertised as $9.95 (or $100 today). Then the organizers of the 1962 World’s Fair decided to hand out free monkey-puzzle saplings—which is when many of the trees you see in the city today were planted. By 1975, a scarcity of seeds was reported across the city.

There is only one monkey puzzle street tree in a planting strip left in the entire city of Seattle, and it is located in Bryant, a neighborhood named after Bryant School, which itself was named after the 19th-century poet and New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant (who, unlike the monkey puzzle tree, had not even a slight connection to Seattle).


Sample neighborhood & tree opener:
Cherry Hill    
Ash (Fraxinus)

The ash tree is one of the most sacred trees in Germanic paganism. In Norse mythology, an immense ash tree known as Yggdrasil, or the “World Tree,” was at the center of the cosmos, with its trunk reaching up to the heavens, its boughs spread over nine realms, and its roots reaching down into the underworld. Seattle City Light didn’t care much about any of this in 1958, when it cut down a 40-year-old ash street tree on West Blaine Street, west of Queen Anne Avenue. The homeowner filed a claim against the city, stating: “Instead of an old house with a beautiful shade tree, we now have just an old house.” Payment of $185 was made to the homeowner by the city for what it claimed was the mistaken removal of the prized tree. Over 60 years later, despite the error, no street tree appears to have been replanted at this location and the gravel strip is used for parking cars.

Threats abound. Over 100 million ash trees have been lost across 15 states since the first emerald ash borer was sighted in Michigan in 2002, a beetle attracted to the specific odor and color of ash trees. So far, Washington has remained unscathed, but it is only a matter of a time: one was sighted in Oregon in 2022. 

Out of Seattle’s 4,300 ash right-of-way trees, which are responsible for removing one million pounds of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere each year, District 3, which includes the Central District, has the most. While the current-day Central District spans many neighborhoods, the northern area became known as Cherry Hill because it was home to the Cherry Hill “urban renewal project,” (1959 to 1976), which resulted in over 1,000 structures being razed.