Directly south from the University of Washington’s Seattle campus is a massive, 230-acre green space. It is a total gem, and importantly, it contains a dynamic assortment of over 40,000 plants—some found nowhere else in the Northwest—cared for by volunteers, arborists, and gardeners.

Since 1936, over 12,480 individual plants have been accessioned and digitized into the Arboretum’s database. These accessions can be categorized into 139 unique families + 3982 unique species.

The idea for this project was to try and capture the level of plant diversity you would see in a given location on the Arboretum's grid.

Constructed from laser-cut plywood and loads of hot glue, each square block represents the presence of five unique species. Inside each block is a wooden rod, whose height is proportional to a block, and represents the number of individual accessions.