by Amanda Sorell

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Seattle is known as the Emerald City, and Seward Park is one of its crown jewels. Living in this lush landscape, on a peninsula on the western edge of Lake Washington in South Seattle, are trees that have grown alongside generations of humans, their thick bark still charred from fires that burned hundreds of years ago. But over the past decade, the forest’s sword ferns and western hemlocks, some of the oldest species in the park, have been mysteriously dwindling.

Friends of Seward Park volunteers, forest stewards, and ecologists don’t know why they’re dying or what will happen to the park’s ecological balance when this ancient flora disappears.

Those stewards and citizen scientists have now spent years gathering clues to uncover the cause of the die-offs, but they say that without better funding, their research can only take them so far. So, Friends of Seward Park — a group of volunteers who work to preserve and protect the park — recently created a video calling for better funding to discover why these critical plants are declining.

Forest like this, the video says, cloaked the landscape of Seattle prior to European settlement, and was home to the Puget Sound Salish who lived on x̌ačuʔ, now known as Lake Washington. Seward Park’s recently reconstructed Lushootseed name is sbəqʷábs (pronounced “spuhQUABS”), meaning “it has a fat nose,” referring to the shape of the peninsula jutting out into the lake. Now, the peninsula is home to one of only two remaining old-growth stands in the city — the other in West Seattle’s Schmitz Preserve Park — and its stewards are hoping to help the rare forest flourish for centuries to come.

The Graveyard and Ground Zero

Paul Shannon, a Green Seattle Partnership forest steward and board member of Friends of Seward Park, spends a lot of time in this forest, where I meet him on a sunny autumn afternoon to hear about his research. In 2021, he pitched a partnership between Friends of Seward Park and CHOOSE 180 to offer three paid internships for youth to gain experience researching the local environment. Shannon and the interns spent six weeks collecting data about the hemlocks, hoping to provide insight into the hemlock die-off, which began in 2008 and accelerated in 2012. Now, two-thirds of the forest’s hemlock trees are dead or dying, and the research has yielded hypotheses but no conclusions. Though all regions of the forest are affected, Shannon guides me to a particularly grim patch, what he calls the “hemlock graveyard,” where browned branches droop from ailing trees of all ages.

Shannon also leads me to “ground zero” of fern decline, pointing to lonely rhizome remnants jutting from bare soil that used to be covered in verdant growth. The fern die-off began in 2015 and initially spread through the forest at a rate of 100 feet per year, a rate that has since slowed. In the Friends of Seward Park video, ecologist Dylan Mendenhall notes that the die-off hasn’t affected co-occurring native plant species, indicating that the blight was likely caused by a pathogen.

Even though the fern die-off has waned, Shannon says the ferns are “just a shadow of what they used to be.” As the ferns die, they leave behind stripped soil that becomes impoverished from repeated exposure to the elements, and, according to Friends of Seward Park, “decades will pass before natural revegetation happens, because little sunlight strikes the ground to drive plant growth.” Stewards and the Seattle Parks Department are experimenting with planting ferns into the die-off areas to see whether they’ll survive.

The hemlocks — shade-tolerant evergreen conifers that fill the park’s midstory and are also Washington’s state tree — are continuing to die at the same rate. These trees are dying elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, but “nowhere so dramatically, nor so easily studied, as here in this 500-year-old forest,” Friends of Seward Park’s website says. If the trend continues in the park, they’ll soon all be gone. Their absence will leave gaps in the ecosystem that could trigger further deficiencies. Shannon says that while some experts have speculated that the decline is normal, as hemlocks in the lowlands have no “second-century” growth, Shannon notes that the young trees, too, are dying off, which complicates the story. “I have to remind myself that we do have data, and that I’m not Chicken Little saying the sky is falling,” he says. “I’m trying to make the case that what’s happening here is not just important to me, and to those of us who love this place, but it’s also got regional importance.”

Canary in the Coal Mine

Tarrell Harrison, a research associate, says in the video that one of the things he wants to take away from the research is “how much we have to take care of this earth” and “take care of where we are … because it has so much to do with who we are.”

Both the plants in the park and the communities near the park are on the “frontlines” of climate impacts. Friends of Seward Park says the forest itself is “exposed to pollution, urban heat, climate change, and heavy visitation. These factors combine, creating unusual vulnerabilities.” South Seattle communities, too, are vulnerable to flooding and heat waves. They’re also exposed to a higher level of pollution than other areas of Seattle and have less of the very thing that could help mitigate the impacts of flooding, heat, and pollution — trees.

Urban forest also improves human health. At the start of the pandemic, when outdoor socialization was thought of as safer than gathering indoors, Seattle park visits remained stable even when trips to other places dramatically declined, and park access was associated with better mental health during that turbulent time. “We not only value Seward Park for those textbook values that we think about when it comes to forests, like carbon sequestration or wildlife habitat,” says plant ecologist Michael Yadrick in the video. “It is important for people’s mental health and just overall well-being that a place like this exists.”

Just as it influences the well-being of people, the forest could also signal the well-being of forests in other regions. This is why Seward Park has come to be dubbed a “canary in the coal mine,” an early warning system for what could happen on a larger scale. In the video, Tim Billo, a lecturer at the University of Washington’s Program on the Environment, says the sword fern die-off has been discovered in other forests throughout the region. “The more we understand here, from our urban research, the more we can start mitigating these kinds of issues — in this case, the sword fern die-off — as it begins to affect more wild landscapes.”

According to Friends of Seward Park, neither the ferns nor the hemlocks have garnered published academic or government studies. And while only the hemlock could be said to have significant economic value to the state, it says, the ecological value of both plants makes them deserving of further attention. In an ecosystem of organisms acting mutualistically in ways both visible and hidden, the health of one element could affect the health of all. Shannon says, “If our forests are, in a small way, the lungs of our planet … then as they degrade, the whole planet degrades. And at least it would be good just to pay close attention and understand it, and maybe find some remedies or some alternative strategies.”

Letting In Light

In 2022, Shannon, CHOOSE 180 interns, and two students from the University of Washington studied the health of Douglas firs to assess whether they, too, were declining, and tentatively concluded that “Douglas fir health has held steady over the last 90 years.” Shannon says this bodes well for the forest, as the Douglas firs “are the real matriarchs in this place,” the backbone standing strong even as the understory around them transforms.

And forest has a way of repairing itself, he says. So while Shannon grieves for lost members of the forest community, he’s also noting what’s taking their place. As we walk through the forest, he points to places where death has made way for life, spaces where sunlight can now break through the canopy, encouraging new plants, like native blackberry and Oregon grape, to take root. His current project is rejuvenating bare soil with mulch to see what returns, and he gestures to snowberry, Indian plum, and hazelnut emerging from the mulch.

Paying attention to our forest neighbors can help us cultivate care for what’s ailing and understand the consequences of our actions, he says. “One of the things I love about this work is that so much that’s wrong with the world is so distant and so abstract and so insusceptible to working directly on, [but] here, with the help of the interns, we had our hands in the dirt.” He takes me to meet the “oldest, tallest creature in Seattle,” a 500-year-old Douglas fir. After we spend a few minutes looking up into its broad boughs, he stops a group of people who might’ve otherwise walked right past this elder — just as I might’ve — and introduces them to the tree, to their delight.

Lora Keyte, one of the UW students who helped study the Douglas firs, also believes seeing the forest change up close — and knowing what’s causing those changes — will encourage people to care. “This is something that we can show people an example, right in front of us, of the effects of whatever it might be. But we have to know what it is, because just speaking to it in these sort of broad terms, like, ‘Oh, it could be climate change … it could be this disease … it could just be, you know, human interaction. It could be all of these things.’ If we can tell people exactly what it is, or get really close to what the problem is, and offer solutions … I think that people will feel more empowered to get involved.”

Mother Nature’s Message

Because of its remaining beauty — the park’s vibrant foliage framed by the water of Lake Washington and a view of Mount Rainier — Shannon and Keyte say visitors to the park may not yet notice what’s missing. So beyond securing funding, Shannon wants to encourage people to watch the video and simply learn about what’s happening. In it, Warren KingGeorge, the oral historian for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, similarly points out how old-growth plants might be overlooked. “The sword fern is one of those that I think has been here for so long and is so bountiful and plentiful that we kind of take it for granted,” he says. “There’s a message being conveyed by Mother Nature that something is wrong and out of balance. We’ve got to do something soon.”

In addition to watching and sharing the video, Shannon says aspiring stewards can contact him to ask questions or sign up for planting parties in the forest. He also references the Seward Park Audubon Center, which offers guided nature walks and a range of community programs for people to get involved in the care of the forest community.

To learn more about the park, review the stewards’ research, and watch the video, visit the Friends of Seward Park website.

And to support urban forests in general, you can participate in the third annual Seattle Forest Week, which begins on Oct. 28 and will involve tree planting, plant walks, and other forest-based activities throughout the city.

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Editors’ Note: This article was updated on 11/02/2023 with added information about the pronunciation for Seward Park’s Lushootseed name.

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Amanda Sorell is a storyteller who lives in Seattle. She’s an editor for the Emerald. Read her newsletter at eClips.Substack.com.

📸 Featured Image: Seward Park ferns at what’s now known as “ground zero,” shown growing in 2011 and gone in 2017. (Left photo by Jordan Jackson, right photo by Paul Shannon)

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