Sidewalk Forest

The Ledger

Every dot is one street tree in the city's inventory. Not parks, not ravines, not backyards: just the trees Toronto itself tends along its road allowances. The colours are families. Where streets burn brightest, the planting runs densest; the downtown core, for all its towers, barely glows.

One in Four

185,621 of the city's street trees are maples, about one in four. No other family comes close. Forestry crews have planted them for a century: fast growers, dense shade, indifferent to abuse. This is what a city that loves one tree looks like.

The Import

The most common street tree in Toronto's inventory is the Norway maple, a European species listed as invasive in Ontario. Counting named cultivars with their species, the ledger holds 99,736 Norway maple records and 12,896 sugar maple records. That is 7.73 to one.

On the map: Norway maples, 99,736

The Workhorse

Where the sidewalk is hardest, the city plants honey locust: 59,904 of them, nearly one street tree in ten. It tolerates salt, drought, compacted soil, and reflected heat, which is a botanical description of a downtown street. The chartreuse constellation below is the core's street canopy, more or less one species.

The Living Fossil

The ginkgo has no living relatives. It has outlasted every tree it evolved beside, two hundred million years and counting, and it shrugs at pollution, salt, and drought. Which is why a Jurassic survivor is now standard issue on Toronto sidewalks: 17,464 of them, glowing gold.

The Elegy

The pale dots are ash trees, and the map is mostly dark. Emerald ash borer, a beetle first found in Toronto in 2007, has killed ash here by the hundreds of thousands. The street ledger now counts 9,948, fewer ash than lilacs. The inventory doesn't record absence, but you can read it in the gaps.

One of Each

Seven trees in the ledger are the only one of their species, single entries among all 688,335 rows. Somewhere on Macdonell Avenue in Parkdale stands the city's only street pawpaw. There is one bald cypress, one sour cherry, one pignut hickory. The gold points are all seven; select one to meet it.

Spread Even

At first the map looks lopsided. Out in Etobicoke the west end holds 52,659 street trees; downtown holds just 8,558, a six-to-one gap. But the west end is also about six times the size. Measure the two fairly, street for street, and they come out nearly the same, and so does almost every corner of the city. That is the quiet surprise here: from the leafy outer neighbourhoods to the glass towers of the core, Toronto lines its streets with trees remarkably evenly. Wherever you live, your street is about as green as anyone else's.

Find Yours

The tree outside your door is probably in this ledger, with its species and trunk width on file. Keep scrolling and the map is yours: zoom in until the dots separate, tap one, and the city will tell you what it is.