Its name promises more than the tree delivers, and that is fine, because the name is comparing it to the wrong thing. The Spokane Heritage Tree Register calls this a Miyabe maple, Acer miyabei, a species native to Japan and rarely planted in North America, and names it a potential state champion. HistoryLink's 2012 survey of the arboretum's champion trees lists the same species among Finch Arboretum's likely state first-place holders. Two sources, register and historian, pointing at the same maple. A state champion sounds like it should compete with the willow down the path or the conifers around it. It does not, because Acer miyabei stays modest for a maple wherever it grows. What makes it the biggest of its kind is simply that almost nobody in Washington has planted one to compare it to. At about 58 years old and 54 feet tall, it is not massive in the way its own register entry names it. It is massive for a species most visitors have never heard of, in an arboretum built on exactly that kind of rarity. No girth has been published for it. If you have measured the trunk, tell us.
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Getting there
John A. Finch Arboretum, Spokane, Washington
You can recognise it by leaves shaped like a maple's but smaller and rounder than the ones nearby, a Japanese species rare in this country. It stands in Finch Arboretum, near the state champion white willow.
West Spokane, off Sunset Highway; car or city bus. Same site as spk_002 (State Champion White Willow) and spk_003 (First Dawn Redwoods).
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: Spokane Heritage Tree Register (City of Spokane Urban Forestry), no. OBJECTID 405, CityandCountyHistoricProp FeatureServer layer 1
- historicspokane.org
- historylink.org
- my.spokanecity.org
- services.arcgis.com