Piper Orchard, orchard in Carkeek Park, Seattle, Washington, United States

Piper Orchard is a historic orchard in northwest Seattle containing dozens of old apple trees, pear trees, and crabapple varieties. The trees grow on a hillside along a creek trail and are maintained by volunteers to keep them healthy and producing fruit.

A. W. Piper, a confectioner and Seattle City Council member, founded the orchard after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 destroyed his Puget Sound Candy Factory. He moved his family to a former lumber camp in today's Piper's Canyon, where the orchard was tended by his wife Wilhelmina and later their son Paul. After Piper's death in 1904, the orchard was forgotten until landscape architect Daphne Lewis rediscovered it in 1981; volunteers then cleared overgrowth and found 29 surviving fruit varieties.

The orchard is named after the Piper family, who planted fruit trees here in the late 1800s and brought their harvest to the city. Today, visitors and volunteers gather to tend the old apple varieties and celebrate the seasonal harvest together.

The orchard is located about halfway up the park on a hillside trail near Piper's Creek, accessible from several park entrances. Visit in spring to see blossoms or autumn to see ripe fruit, and wear shoes suitable for an unpaved, gently sloped path.

The orchard's trees are planted on a 20-foot grid, still visible from the surviving 1890s stock, and the rows are labelled A to L and 1 to 16. Twenty-nine old fruit varieties were found when volunteers cleared the overgrowth in 1983, among them Wealthy, Gravenstein and Esopus Spitzenburg.