The Roanoke Street Lombardy Poplar

Lombardy poplars are famous for being narrow, and the city's figure for this one says otherwise: a trunk 81 inches across at chest height, which is about 21 feet round, under a tree recorded at 108 feet tall. For a tree planted almost everywhere as a slim green column along a fence line, that is an unusually heavy base. It stands in Roanoke Street Mini Park, a scrap of public ground where East Roanoke Street runs out at Lake Union, in Eastlake. In 2010 the city named it a Heritage Tree together with three weeping willows beside it, and treated the four as a heritage grove, which is recorded on a plaque in the south part of the park. So the poplar shares the honour, and the shoreline, with three trees of a completely different shape: one shooting straight up, three hanging down. The last city survey was in 2019, and naturalists logged the tree on iNaturalist as recently as April 2026. It is a different tree from the University of Washington's world's-fair poplar. Nobody has published a planting date, and a trunk that thick on a poplar is worth a second look. If you pass with a tape measure, a girth taken at chest height would settle it, and the figure goes on this page.