The Chinese Scholar Tree of Cal Anderson Park

When the Capitol Hill light rail station was being dug, this tree stood just inside the construction wall, and a local reporter wrote in 2015 that it was probably only still standing because it was a Heritage Tree. That listing, run by the city with the group PlantAmnesty, is the likeliest reason a century-old tree came through the dig. It is a Chinese scholar tree, also known as the Japanese pagoda tree, and the Capitol Hill Historical Society describes it as more than a century old and one of the trees still left from the Olmsted Brothers' design for the park. Nobody has published a planting year, so a century and a bit is as close as the sources go. The same 2015 article called it the largest of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. No measurement has been published to go with that, so read it as a proud local claim rather than a ranking anybody has checked. If you have a tape measure, the trunk is the one figure this page is missing, and we would like it. So the tree has seen the park as the Olmsteds planned it and the neighbourhood as it is now, with a train station built right beside it. The pin marks the corner rather than the trunk, but the corner does most of the work: come up out of the station entrance at the northwest of the park and it is right there.