Snow Gum Eucalyptus

 

7/15/24 snow gum eucalyptus trees, Maple Leaf neighborhood

When I first tracked down these eucalyptus trees from Taha Ebrahimi’s book, Street Trees of Seattle, I was delighted to realize I already knew these trees. Admiring them for years on one of my walking routes (almost daily during the pandemic), I had always wanted to sketch them, but the light was never quite right in the mornings when I tend to take my walks. Learning that these were special street trees, however, motivated me to look for the right light and finally give them a draw.

The best light turned out to be in the late afternoon when I’m least likely to walk, especially as the days grew hotter, and that time of day is the hottest. One day before our recent heatwave set in, I made a gestural sketch to learn more about their form and try to capture as much as I could of their height (yet I lost most of their crowns; on the right in the page spread below).

Gestural sketch on the right

A couple of weeks later it finally cooled enough to go back and spend more time focusing on their trunks (top of post). From this angle, it’s hard to tell that these are two trees and not one, but when I move so that both trees should be distinctly visible, that parked car is always in the way (of course, that’s a Murphy’s Law of urban sketching). This angle does have the best light, though, so I went with it. They seem to lean so precariously from relatively slender trunks.

6/13/24 My first thumbnail sketch

According to Taha’s book, these are Seattle’s first recorded eucalyptus street trees. They were registered on July 25, 1978, the same day that downtown Seattle’s Rainier Club first admitted a Black member. That type of historical note gives amazing context to the life of these street trees. That was only the year after I graduated from high school – not that long ago, from a historical perspective – yet it’s shocking to think that Blacks were not admitted to a social club in liberal Seattle before then.