Did you get your free tree this year? This will sound like a parody of the Pacific Northwest, but yes, it’s true—the city will just hand out free pine trees to residents, about a thousand a year. Even in the pandemic, Seattle’s street tree program is chugging right along, and deliveries began this week.
It’s a simple process: You just fill out an application, the city holds a random lottery, and then the winners get cedars and oaks and beeches and so on. Recipients get a few years of arboreal assistance, in the form of planting classes and “pruning workshops,” which sounds fun. And with rain on the way, we’re about to enter prime planting season, so you can expect to see more greenery coming to a street or backyard near you.
While the city disperses new trees around Seattle, there’s extra focus on one neighborhood in particular this year.
Around three dozen trees have been set aside just for the High Point Community, a planned development near Delridge. When you first look at the neighborhood, with lots of green yards and single-family homes, you might be like, “Ohhh, of course, this is for rich people.” But High Point is not entirely as it appears; a former crime hotspot, it was redeveloped in the early 2000s to contain a mix of all different income levels. With a significant immigrant population, the area’s quite diverse.
And that diversity extends to the tree population as well, with High Point getting a mix of Western Red Cedar, Chinese Fringe Tree, White Oak, and more, according to the city. I’m personally partial to the fringe tree myself since it has nice honeysuckle-looking blooms, and as it is the whole place is already lousy with Maple.
If you’d like a tree of your very own, and you have a place to put it (not your bathtub), applications for the Grand Fir waitlist are still open. And now’s a particularly good time to plan your autumn tree strategy, as we’re just three short weeks from the busy Arbor Day holiday season, with lots of events on the calendar! Starting on October 26, there’ll be a ceremonial tree planting in the Central District; a virtual walking tour of the city’s oldest trees, and a workshop about telling tree-related stories, which might sound just a little boring but then again there are a lot of thrilling Norse myths connected to stories about Yggdrasil, the world tree.
Anyway, trees! We primates all made a terrible mistake when we decided to live anywhere else.
