Street Trees of Seattle

An Illustrated Walking Guide

Taha Ebrahimi

Washington is known as the Evergreen State, so it’s no surprise that Seattle is home to 730 different kinds of street trees. In this charming, practical, offbeat ‘guidebook,’ Taha Ebrahimi makes the case for putting down the digital and taking a walk.

During the 2020 Covid quarantine, Ebrahimi — a professional data visualizer — found herself walking Seattle’s streets and attempting to learn about its trees. She’s always equated ‘horticultural knowledge with authority, the right to belong to a place.’ As a first-generation Seattleite, she craved that sense of belonging, especially during the pandemic’s forced isolation.

Turning the notion of ‘forest bathing’ on its ear, she immersed herself in the trees of her home city and found a whole new world to explore.

Seattle has three times the tree diversity of most cities — and a rich data set to document them. The Seattle Department of Transportation’s Urban Forestry team published data in 2020 that includes seven decades of details about more than 170,000 trees in the public right-of-way.

Ebrahami made it her mission to visit trees around Seattle, then used her data visualization skills to share what she learned. She turned stats into stories, drawing the trees, creating maps to put them in context, and highlighting their details — leaves, buds, flowers, berries, and needles. In her hands, the trees become characters in the story of the city.

You’ll meet the majestic redwoods of Seattle, the monkey puzzle trees, the Chinese windmill palms, and the prankster of the tree world: the false cypress. There’s the giant sequoia in front of the Macy’s downtown and the epic beech trees in Volunteer Park. The book is organized by neighborhood, so you can use it as a walking tour guide — or armchair travel to enjoy virtual greenery wherever you are.

Fair warning: This book might inspire you to get to know the trees of your own neighborhood. Grab a snack and comfy walking shoes.

Seattle’s own urban street tree planting began in earnest in the 1900s, fueled by the desire to be major city following in the steps of the City Beautiful movement. Surges in street tree planing coincided with events that brought visitors to the city, including the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, and, later, the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962… Seattle’s relationship with individual tree species and street trees over the decades reveals quirky reports of civic engagement and tangled intention… ‘Street trees do more to enhance the city than any piece of sculpture, [a citizen] argued. ‘You need to preserve what is culturally strong in a nation, or devastation can result.’ — Taha Ebrahimi

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