Another Successful Planting Season Wrapped
Updated: Sep 13
As we enter the month of May, we approach National Love a Tree Day. According to the National Day Calendar, “National Love a Tree Day on May 16th celebrates the joys of life provided by trees. Whether you love reading in the shade or taking a bite out of a fresh fruit pie, National Love a Tree Day encourages everyone to get outside and enjoy a tree. Of course, planting trees for future generations to love is beneficial too.
While we look forward to this celebration, we also want to look back at last month’s accomplishments around Earth Day, and even further back at the accomplishments of the 2025-2026 planting season.
It’s not all about planting trees
Earth Day comes after planting season has ended but kicks off the seasons we spend caring for the land in other ways, including protecting the trees we just planted. To celebrate Earth Day this year, volunteers all over the city pulled weeds and spread mulch around the vulnerable young native plants that we installed over the fall and winter. That’s one way of loving a tree. As we move into summer, many of our professional crews will spend time watering these young plants. That’s another way of loving a tree. You may enjoy a warm, sunny day this month and lay under the shade of one of our mature conifers that existed long before the Green Seattle Partnership began. That’s a fantastic way to love a tree.
One great way to celebrate our wonderful plants this month is to recognize the accomplishments of our most recent planting season. Please enjoy this mix of stats, stories, and pictures, and maybe the next time a tree makes you happy, you can think fondly of the work that went into maintaining that tree.
Planting Season Recap
In the 2025-2026 planting season, the Green Seattle Partnership planted:
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Trees
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Shrubs
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Ground Cover Plants
Like every year, this planting season started with Green Seattle Day. Across 17 sites citywide, Green Seattle Partnership staff, volunteers, and program participants came out to kick off planting season with the return of the rain during the annual Green Seattle Day in October 2025.
Between then and now, one of our amazing professional crews, Zaldivar’s Forestry, spent ample time improving the East Duwamish Greenspace in Beacon Hill. This greenspace is uniquely massive for southeast Seattle, a relatively low-income part of the city lacking in canopy cover. The area has seen a lot of good work over the years but still has plenty of space for native plant species that can grow and transform it into a thriving, diverse forest. This season alone, Zaldivar’s planted over 5,000 trees and over 7,000 plants total, making a huge difference for this forest and the communities around it.
The Longfellow Creek Greenspace is another large forest in West Seattle, and it serves as a vital habitat for birds, beavers, fish, and people alike. This planting season, our partner organization, EarthCorps, planted over 600 trees and nearly 4,000 plants in total, making this already beautiful greenspace even more vibrant.
This planting season, Parks and Recreation’s very own Natural Area Crew installed nearly 2,000 plants across 11 different sites around the City including Cheasty Greenspace, Clark’s Meadow at Seward Park, Golden Gardens, and Herring’s House.
Many of our planting events are better quantified by the people we reached than by the number of plants we installed. Some of our newest Forest Stewards hosted their largest event yet, with 52 University of Washington students who came out to install plants around Green Lake. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, our Forest Steward, Lisa, was at Lincoln Park with the West Seattle High School Earth Club and enjoyed a gorgeous day of planting and service to the land.
We can’t comprehensively describe every planting project with every volunteer, Forest Steward, Partner Organization, or Professional Crew in every park and neighborhood. Over the course of this planting season, there were too many supporters to count, but we owe them a debt of gratitude for their hard work and dedication to our Future Healthy Forests. Post planting season, the work continues every day to improve the habitat these plants grow in with weeding, watering, mulching, and we look onward to the next planting season kick off with another Green Seattle Day this fall. Until then, love a tree today and every day, and help us give back to the land when you can.
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