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Distinguished Trees of Leschi

Buster Simpson’s Plantings

First in a series of occasional photo essays

As we slide out of summer, let’s have a look at some of Leschi’s distinguished trees.


Seattle has about 730 different kinds of street trees, which is to say, trees planted along a street right-of-way. This does not include trees in parks or on private property, categories we’ll also look at in coming articles. And I write “planted” advisedly: the last remaining original tree downtown was cut in 1879, and most of the city eventually followed, excepting parts of Schmitz and Seward parks, and very few other scattered locations. By 1910, the lumber and sawmill industries provided about 2/3 of the state’s jobs.

Reforesting the city has been the work of over a century, but we are not keeping up. In the 1970s, 40 percent of Seattle was forested. By the 2010s that coverage had shrunk to 28 percent. The ongoing rush to build big Manhattan-style housing complexes, with 100 percent lot coverage, results in further loss. Even when there are statutory tree protections, they don’t seem to be taken seriously by either developers or those in the city government who are supposed to be enforcing them. The final story in this series will be a case in point.


The question of the conflict between tree preservation and housing development is a fraught one. A couple of local stories have at least scratched the surface of this conversation:


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American Liberty Elm
American Liberty Elm

An American Liberty Elm was planted in 1996 in the traffic circle at 28th and Dearborn by long-time Leschi artist Buster Simpson and others. This variety is thought to be resistant to Dutch Elm disease, which, between 1930 and 1990, wiped out 75 percent of the iconic trees across the US.

The elm specimen and three others started as young saplings from a 1989 installation done by the artist at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum. Simpson brought the four cuttings to Seattle after the DC show. Three were planted in Belltown as part of the “Urban Arboretum” project initiated in the 1980s. Two of those were destroyed when condominiums were under construction there. The third one lives to this day at First Avenue and Denny Way, and the fourth (above) is thriving here in Leschi.


The Elms as youngsters
The Elms as youngsters

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On Charles Street just west of Yakima Avenue are four Douglas Fir trees. Not too hefty, the firs are unremarkable but for their number and their provenance. When less than a foot tall, they were part of the 1991 Buster Simpson exhibit “Effluence of Affluence” at the old Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park (now the Asian Art Museum). After that show, he planted and nurtured them in Leschi.

For some other tree stories, see:

  • “Secret Seattle” by Susanna Ryan, chapter on “Deep Roots: Trees of Seattle,” 2021

  • The encyclopedic “Trees of Seattle,” by Arthur Lee Jacobson, 1989, 2006

  • “Street Trees of Seattle”, by Taha Ebrahim, 2024. It has the advantage of being organized by neighborhood; none of us, however, would agree with the author’s definition of Leschi’s boundaries.


To be continued


Special thanks to Buster Simpson for his guidance on this article. Here he is with two of his Douglas Firs.
Special thanks to Buster Simpson for his guidance on this article. Here he is with two of his Douglas Firs.

~Roger Lippman

The author writes monthly about Leschi history and his experiences over more than 50 years in the neighborhood.

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