Street Trees of Seattle | An Illustrated Walking Guide

Bryant Neighborhood Highlight

Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria)

Ties between the monkey puzzle tree and the Pacific Northwest go back as far as the tree’s introduction outside its native Chile. In 1792, Captain George Vancouver led an expedition to explore North America’s Pacific coast, and on the voyage back to Great Britain, he and his crew stopped in Chile, where they were served edible seeds from an unusual-looking tree. The ship’s botanist, Archibald Menzies, pocketed some of the seeds and grew them during the trip home, which is how he introduced five young saplings to Britain in 1795, along with the crew’s other findings from the Pacific Northwest territory, forever associating the monkey puzzle with this region.

In Seattle, the earliest mention of this odd evergreen in the Seattle Daily Times is in 1925, when a listing advertised a 10-foot-high tree that could be purchased for $5 (about $85 today). By 1960, the cost of a monkey puzzle tree in Seattle was advertised as $9.95 (or $100 today). Then the organizers of the 1962 World’s Fair decided to hand out free monkey-puzzle saplings—which is when many of the trees you see in the city today were planted. By 1975, a scarcity of seeds was reported across the city.

There is only one monkey puzzle street tree in a planting strip left in the entire city of Seattle, and it is located in Bryant, a neighborhood named after Bryant School, which itself was named after the 19th-century poet and New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant (who, unlike the monkey puzzle tree, had not even a slight connection to Seattle).