Seattle logged nearly all of itself, and then kept about 120 acres it never touched. That is Seward Park, where a Douglas fir of 400 to 500 years still stands with an eagle nest in it, the oldest known tree in the city. The other four are plantings: a giant sequoia on Capitol Hill, a grand fir that predates the Japanese garden built around it, a state champion in the arboretum, and a poplar dated to the world's fair of 1909.
0 of 6 visited in Seattle
1
Seward Park's Big Tree
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · roughly 400 to 500 years · Seward Park
Seattle's oldest known tree still carries the burn marks of two fires, one in 1508 and one in 1701, when the Puget lowlands went up and this Douglas fir did not. The scarred bark is on the trunk, which is about seven feet across. The tree is around 150 feet tall.
How old is a matter of who you ask. Friends of Seward Park, the group that looks after the forest, says 500 years. Seattle Magazine says over 400. Somewhere in that band is the honest answer, and either end of it means this tree was a mature fir before any European saw Puget Sound. Bald eagles have nested in it.
It used to carry a Heritage Tree plaque. The plaque was taken down because the number of people walking in to see it was wearing the ground away over the roots, which tells you both how good the tree is and how to behave around it.
No source publishes where it stands inside the 120 acres of old growth on the Bailey Peninsula, so the pin marks the park rather than the trunk and finding it is part of the afternoon. One warning: the young fir the park's printed tree walk starts with, near the Audubon building, is a different tree and a couple of centuries younger.
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2
The Volunteer Park Giant Sequoia
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · Capitol Hill
The only measurements ever published about this sequoia are not measurements of this sequoia. The city's own tree walk, which lists it as stop 9 on the north east loop of Volunteer Park, describes it growing to 280 feet with a trunk 26 feet through. Those are the figures for the species, the largest tree on earth by volume, and nobody has put a tape around this particular trunk.
What the leaflet does confirm is the tree: a good giant sequoia standing near East Highland Drive, with the thick spongy bark that is the easiest way to identify one, and the only way to identify one without looking up.
Its age is unrecorded. Volunteer Park was landscaped by the Olmsted Brothers between 1904 and 1912, and it is tempting to date the sequoia from that work, but no source connects this tree to it, so it stays undated here rather than dated by association.
Which means there is a question on this page that somebody in Capitol Hill can answer. If you have a planting record, a nursery receipt, an old photograph of this corner of the park or simply a tape measure and a free afternoon, tell us and we will fill the gap in.
The pin marks the north east corner of the park rather than the tree.
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3
The Grand Fir of Kubota Garden
Grand Fir (Abies grandis) · roughly 200 years · Rainier Beach
When Fujitaro Kubota bought this land in 1927 it had been logged, and this grand fir was one of the few trees the loggers had left. Everything else you walk past in Kubota Garden was planted afterwards, around it. The garden is the newcomer.
It now stands 139 feet tall at the base of the Spring Pond, below the Terrace Overlook, and the tree walk that covers the garden estimates it at 200 years old. That figure comes from a single document, the walk produced jointly by the city's Trees for Seattle programme and the Kubota Garden Foundation, and no second source has confirmed it, so read it as a good estimate rather than a settled number. Grand firs live comfortably beyond 250 years, so the estimate sits well within what the species does.
The interest here is the contrast. Kubota spent decades building a Japanese garden out of Pacific Northwest plants, and this fir is the piece of the actual Pacific Northwest forest that was already on the site when he started, a survivor of the original woodland standing over ponds and stone that were arranged much later.
The garden is free and open in daylight hours. The pin marks the entrance rather than the tree, so walk in and head for the Spring Pond below the Terrace Overlook.
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4
The Bigcone Douglas Fir of Washington Park Arboretum
Bigcone Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga macrocarpa) · Madison Valley / Washington Park Arboretum
This fir is about a thousand miles from where its species grows wild. Pseudotsuga macrocarpa is native only to the mountains of southern California, and the largest one known in Washington State is standing in a public arboretum in Seattle.
It was recorded as a state champion in Robert Van Pelt's 2003 survey of Washington's biggest trees, and the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, who run the Arboretum, list it as one of their champions and have been re-measuring it. Both of those threads run back to the same 2003 survey, so the title rests on one original piece of fieldwork rather than two.
The reason to walk out and see it is in the name. Bigcone Douglas fir carries by far the largest cones in its genus, several times the size of the ones that litter every pavement in this part of the world, and a tree that size drops them where you can pick one up. It is a curiosity rather than a giant, and it is the sort of thing an arboretum exists for.
No age or girth has been published for it. It stands on the Upper Trail just south of the Pacific Connections New Zealand Forest Garden, at the south end of the Arboretum; the pin marks the Arboretum itself.
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5
The AYPE Lombardy Poplar
Lombardy Poplar (Populus nigra 'Italica') · roughly 115 to 120 years · University District
This poplar is a leftover from a world's fair. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909 was held on this part of the University of Washington campus, and the university's own campus tree tour dates this burly trunk to that event, which makes it about 115 to 120 years old and one of the few living things on the grounds that saw the fair.
The building across the street backs the date up. Architecture Hall was built as the Fine Arts Palace for the same exposition, and it and the poplar have stood facing each other on the corner of Stevens Way ever since, one of them looking rather more temporary than the other.
A Lombardy poplar is a narrow upright form of black poplar, grown from cuttings rather than seed, which is why they all look identical and why they turn up in rows along drives and boundaries. This one is not a record holder and does not claim to be: bigger Lombardy poplars have been claimed elsewhere in Seattle. Its distinction is that somebody wrote down where it came from.
Campus grounds are open and free. The pin uses the campus centre, so navigate to the corner of Stevens Way and Grant Lane, opposite Architecture Hall, and look up.
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6
Sylvia
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · about 600 years · Holmes Point, Kirkland
Sylvia was the biggest tree in King County until the morning of 20 January 1993, when an inauguration day windstorm came up Lake Washington and took her top off. She was 255 feet then. She is a good deal shorter now and still standing, which is the part worth walking for: a Douglas fir about eight metres round, growing here since roughly the time Constantinople fell.
The snapped crown is not damage so much as biography. A Douglas fir that loses its leader does not die, it reorganises, pushing side branches upward into a candelabra of new tops. Sylvia has been doing that for thirty years and the result looks nothing like the clean spire in a forestry photograph.
She stands in what is left of the lowland old growth that once ran unbroken from the lake to the Cascades. O.O. Denny Park keeps about forty acres of it, given to Seattle by the Denny family and now looked after by Kirkland. The trail in from Holmes Point Drive follows a creek under trees that were already large when the first mill opened on the far shore.
We cannot give you a pin on the trunk. Follow the creek trail and look for the one with no proper top.
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