by Amanda Sorell

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.