Couch Park Cucumber Tree

This magnolia is about thirty metres tall, and it stands on a city block that only ever held one house. That house belonged to Cicero Horatius Lewis, who built it in 1879 and 1880, and the tree was planted on his estate around 1900, which makes it roughly 125 years old. In 1917 the house was razed to make room for a park beside Couch School, the building that is now the Metropolitan Learning Center. The tree has outlasted the family home by more than a century and now stands in the southeast corner of Couch Park. The cucumber tree is a magnolia native to the eastern United States, named for its young fruit, and it is rare this far west. Portland's heritage register, which designated this one in 1994, calls it perhaps the largest in the city. How large depends on who you ask. The register gives 100 feet tall, a 55 foot spread and a trunk 17.4 feet round, about 5.3 metres. Portland Parks' own species page gives 93 feet, a 63 foot spread and 15.35 feet round. Nobody has reconciled the two figures, and both describe a tree far bigger than most people expect a magnolia to be. It is free to visit, in a public park on NW Glisan Street, and somebody photographed it there in May 2026.