Seattle's street trees have something to tell you

Taha Ebrahimi pointed to a golden chain tree along a street in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood. It's the widest of its kind in the entire city. But golden chain trees have slowly disappeared from Seattle over the decades.

“These seeds ... these are actually poisonous," Ebrahimi told KUOW's Paige Browning on an episode of Seattle Now.

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"In the 1960s, Seattle Children’s Hospital considered golden chain to be the biggest threat to children in Seattle. And now there are only 338 golden chain street trees in the city, probably for that reason.”

Golden chain trees have bright yellow flowers that droop when they bloom. They're among a wide variety of street trees in Seattle — trees planted along sidewalks or at least 10 feet from a curb. They're one of the reasons Seattle is so green. But such trees are more than decoration. Aside from the shade and noise damping benefits they provide, trees tell stories. They hold history. It's a history Ebrahimi says anyone can find sprouting throughout the city.

Street trees of Seattle

Like many did when the pandemic hit in 2020, Ebrahimi started taking neighborhood walks. She’d pass one tree, then another, very different varieties, and started wondering how, and why, they were there.

Luckily, Seattle has an online tree database for such curious minds. It helped, but it has its limits. So Ebrahimi called up Arthur Jacobson, author of “Trees of Seattle” and got him to join her on what became street tree walks.

“Together, we’d be walking and validating this data and it became obvious that a lot of the data was wrong," Ebrahimi said. "We found out about 22% of the city’s data was wrong.”

That put Ebrahimi on a mission: To accurately track Seattle’s street trees. It also added up to her new book, “Street Trees of Seattle.”

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It’s an illustrated walking guide to Seattle’s popular neighborhoods, from Ballard to Delridge, Columbia City to downtown. Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, and Wedgwood get two chapters each, divided up by north and south corners of those neighborhoods. Her hope is that people will take walks, as she did, and take time to see the trees around them every day.

The book comes during an era of concern around Seattle’s shrinking canopy and efforts to preserve city trees amid a push for more housing development.

“Georgetown has some of the least tree canopy cover in the city,” Ebrahimi said, noting that the industrial neighborhood has 22% canopy cover, and 16% of that are trees in the right of way. “Compared to Capitol Hill that has 37%, that’s a lot fewer trees."

About 5% of Seattle's street trees are actually native to the region, such as big leaf maples, which are now frowned upon in the city.

“In the old days of Seattle, the most street tree type that we had was a big leaf maple, our native maples," Ebrahimi said while noting the city doesn't allow them as street trees anymore. "You could probably guess why … they get so massive that they crack up the sidewalks.”

A walk through Seattle will produce views of many other trees, such as English holly, which is invasive. This tree, however, was intentionally placed in the city.

“There was a woman in the early 20th century who wanted to make Seattle and Washington state the ‘holly state,’ so she encouraged all the holly," Ebrahimi said. "She was the wife of a pretty well-known lumberman in Ballard. So she got lots of volunteer help, she got the Girl Scouts to help her plant hollies, and it turns out they were very, very invasive.”

Another standout are monkey puzzle trees.

“At the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, they handed out free monkey puzzle saplings," Ebrahimi said. "So most of the monkey puzzles you see around here are actually planted from that time.”

As Seattle has changed, so has its trees, either through loss, or new additions. The region was logged, then developed, and planted, and more. Trees have largely carried these moments through time.

“Seattle has a really remarkable history of these rises and falls and … the land has been changed so much,” she said, noting how they were standing on a flat street that was once in the middle of the Duwamish River. “We did the same thing with the Denny Regrade; we completely got rid of a massive hill. We created the ship canal. We lowered Lake Washington. We did all these physical things. I think one thing we can share with the past is that we’ve always been mourning the loss of our environment and the way things have always been changing here.”

Listen to the full segment with "Street Trees of Seattle" author Taha Ebrahimi on this episode of Seattle Now.