What is the oldest tree in Seattle?
The oldest tree in Seattle is the Big Tree in Seward Park, a Douglas fir of roughly 400 to 500 years standing in the old-growth remnant on the peninsula, with a bald eagle nest near its top. Nobody publishes exactly where it is in the park's 120 acres, so finding it is part of the walk, and the much younger fir the park's own leaflet starts you at is not it.
Seattle has no register of individual trees, which shapes everything on this page. The city runs a Heritage Tree programme with the group PlantAmnesty and it names trees without publishing a dataset, the parks department's own file is a full street inventory rather than a selection, and Washington's state champion list records size rather than age. So every pin here is approximate, meaning we know the park and not the trunk, and two of the six trees have no recorded age at all. That includes the giant sequoia on Capitol Hill, where the city's own tree-walk leaflet quotes a height and a diameter that belong to what the species can reach rather than to this tree, which is the kind of number that gets repeated until somebody checks it. We would rather say we do not know. If you have a tape measure and ten minutes in Volunteer Park, you can settle it, and we will put your figure on the page.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.