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The University of Washington Quad, whose Yoshino cherry trees hide a genuine unsolved campus mystery, plus a further live view of the city. Live 24/7.
Two cameras, one unsolved botanical mystery
The University of Washington broadcasts a live view of the Quad's famous Yoshino cherry trees; a second YouTube live stream adds a further view of Seattle.
Seattle — a university quad whose most famous trees have no confirmed origin story
Every spring, thousands of visitors crowd into the University of Washington's Quad to see roughly 29 Yoshino cherry trees burst into pink and white bloom over the campus's Gothic Revival buildings. For decades, the accepted story was simple: the trees were purchased for $1.25 each in 1939 for the Washington Park Arboretum, then transplanted to the Quad around 1962 to make way for highway construction. It's a tidy narrative — and, according to research by a visiting Japanese exchange student in 2016-17, probably wrong.
Yuki Shiotani's investigation found evidence that the Quad's own trees may have been planted years earlier, possibly around 1936 under a Works Progress Administration New Deal program, with a genuinely different set of trees going into the Arboretum in 1939. A 2025-26 genome project by UW students has continued digging into the puzzle, and the honest answer, even today, is that nobody has definitive proof of where Seattle's most photographed trees actually came from before they arrived on campus.
What the two cameras show
UW Quad Cherry Blossoms
University of Washington · LiveLive view of the Quad's Yoshino cherry trees, framed by the university's Gothic Revival architecture.
Watch live →Seattle Live
YouTube Live · SeattleA second live stream covering a further view of Seattle, Washington.
Watch live →Yoshino cherries don't produce fruit or seeds at all — every single tree in the Quad, and every Yoshino anywhere in the world, is propagated by cloning from a variety established in Japan in the 1800s. That makes tracing the exact lineage of the Quad's specific trees even harder, since there's no seed record to follow, only grafts and cuttings passed hand to hand for nearly a century.
Seattle beyond the webcams
Space Needle: built for the 1962 World's Fair, still the city's defining silhouette against Mount Rainier.
Pike Place Market: opened in 1907, one of the oldest continuously operating public farmers markets in the United States.
Washington Park Arboretum: the garden that may or may not be the true birthplace of the Quad's cherry trees, depending on which theory you believe.
A university has spent nearly a decade running genome projects and archival digs just to figure out where its own most-photographed trees came from — and still doesn't have a definitive answer. Seattle's most reliable annual spectacle turns out to rest on one of its least reliable historical records.
When to watch
UW Quad, mid-to-late March: for peak Yoshino bloom, historically falling between March 12 and April 3.
Getting there: the Quad sits at the heart of the University of Washington's Seattle campus, near Red Square, Washington, USA.
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