May 11th - Brockman Tree Tour

UW Campus - May 11th
Weather - warm, high 60s/low 70s, moderately clear skies

Sarah, Jessie, and I met on campus to go through as many trees in the Brockman Memorial Tree Tour as we could to prepare for our tree tour for the class. We printed out the sheet and map of trees and headed out to W Stevens Way by the Urban Farm and Botany Greenhouse where we started trying to find the trees listed.

We discovered that the trees were much harder to find than expected, mainly because there were no GPS coordinates on the tour, as we had originally thought. We spent most of our time looking up pictures of the trees on our phones to compare with ones we thought were in the right location, as well as using our intuition from what we had learned so far. Unfortunately the images on the tour website were unclear or taken at times when the trees had lost their leaves or were not flowering, making it even more difficult to determine whether we were identifying the same tree. Some trees did have labels on them that illustrated they were part of the tree tour.

We noticed that the most common trees on campus were Western Redcedars, Deodar Cedars, Western Hemlocks, Douglas Firs, and Lawson Cypresses.

The tour took us around W Stevens Way past Winkenwerder Hall, all the way to the Hub by Allen Library. We managed to identify about 18 trees in two hours. These trees are listed in the species list below.

Species List

1. Deodar Cedar (Cedrus Deodara)
2. Monterey Pine (Pinus radiata)
3. European Larch (Larix decidua)
4. China-Fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata)
5. Japanese Snowbell Tree (Styrax japonicus)
6. Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)
7. Bigcone Pine (Pinus Coulteri)
8. Lawson Cypress (Chamaecyparis Lawsoniana)
9. Kwanzan Cherry (Prunus serrulata 'Kwanzan')
10. English Elm (Ulmus procera)
11. Pin Oak (Quercus palustris)
12. Eastern Dogwood (Cornus florida)
13. Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba)
14. American White Elm (Ulmus americana)
15. Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos f. inermis)
16. Silk Tree (Albizia Julibrissin)
17. Pindrow Fir (Abies Pindrow)

The Brockman Tree Tour link is here: http://www.cfr.washington.edu/BrockmanTreeTour/

Link to our UW Trees iNaturalist Project is here: http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/university-of-washington-trees

Posted on June 5, 2012 07:31 AM by ashersh