The Grand Fir of Kubota Garden

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.