The Ross Playground Bigleaf Maple

The trunk of this bigleaf maple is 63 inches across, about 16 and a half feet round, which puts it among the largest Heritage maples in Seattle's tree inventory. The same record gives it a height of 92 feet, about 28 metres, and a crown estimated at 99 feet wide. It spreads further than it climbs. It stands in Ross Playground, a small Fremont park on 4th Avenue NW, free and open from six in the morning until ten at night. Bigleaf maple is the native maple of this coast, and the city has listed this one as a Heritage Tree. Everything we know comes from that one place: the city's street-tree inventory, which also supplies the coordinate our pin uses, at the trunk. A city crew last checked the tree in August 2019 and recorded it in service. Naturalists have logged plants within 150 metres since then, as recently as September 2026, but none of those records is clearly this maple, so 2019 is the latest word on it we can stand behind. Nobody has published an age for it either. A trunk this size invites a guess, and we would rather leave the line empty than make one. If you know how long this maple has stood over the playground, tell us.