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Since its inception, the purpose of the University of Washington Arboretum has been to form a collection of trees and plants from around the world as a source for research and public enjoyment. Located south of the school's Seattle campus, the Arboretum is one of the premier arboreta in the United States.

In the 1890s, after the University of Washington campus moved to its present site, some faculty and administrators envisioned building an arboretum as part of the campus. Their efforts resulted in a collection of trees and plants near where Drumheller Fountain is now located. However, the new campus design, implemented prior to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, destroyed the rudimentary collection.

The plan for the present Arboretum began developing in the early 1920s. The University proposed that Seattle give the school full use of Washington Park and its infrastructure for an arboretum. In 1924, Seattle's Board of Park Commissioners accepted the proposal. However, funding remained poor and little development was accomplished over the next decade.

Substantial development of the Arboretum did not begin until the public relief programs of the Great Depression provided the necessary resources. From 1935 to 1941, the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) played a major role in the Arboretum's development by providing labor and other resources. The Washington Emergency Relief Agency also played a similar but lesser role during the 1930s.

In addition to public relief agencies, private organizations in the mid-1930s began to provide support. In 1935, the Arboretum Foundation was created to raise an endowment for the maintenance and promotion of the park. Also in 1935, the Seattle Garden Club hired the firm of the Olmsted Bros., of Brookline, Massachusetts, to prepare a master plan. The firm intended their plan to be preliminary, but since its implementation in 1936, this design has endured despite criticism that it uses an outdated system of grouping plants by taxonomy.

With the official establishment of the Arboretum in 1934, the University named Hugo Winkenwerder, Dean of the College of Forestry, as Acting Director of the Arboretum. However, Winkenwerder still maintained his full workload at the University and in 1938 recommended that a full-time Director be hired. John Hanley became the first full-time Director in 1938 until he resigned in 1948 and was replaced by Brian Mulligan. Mulligan retired in 1972 as the last Director. The position then became the Curator of Plant Collections, which Joseph Witt filled in 1973.

The end of Depression relief programs and the beginning of World War II meant an end to much of the Arboretum's public support, but in 1945 Washington's state legislature began funding the Arboretum directly. Increased state funding brought administrative changes for the Arboretum, as the University expanded its management power. Since 1935 the University of Washington Arboretum Committee (later called the UW Arboretum Board) had served mainly to provide technical advice. Heeding complaints from members of the campus community who argued that the University should have more control over state funds that went into the park, UW President Lee Paul Sieg made attempts to give the University more control over the Arboretum's operations and diminished the management role of the Foundation. In 1949, the Arboretums budget came under the University's College of Forestry, continuing the trend toward more University management of the park.

While the Arboretum had managed to acquire land through various deals during the 1930s and 40s, neighboring development reduced some of its space. In 1945, the Seattle Historical Museum (now the Museum of History and Industry) took some land in the northern part of the park. In the early 1950s, the Arboretum lost another 51 acres because of the construction of a second bridge across Lake Washington. Both of these issues incited protest from Arboretum supporters.

In the 1960s, management of the Arboretum underwent more changes. UW President Charles Odegaard discharged the University Arboretum Advisory Committee and in its place established three new committees: the University Committee on the Arboretum, the City-University Liaison Committee, and the Advisory Committee on Programs for the University of Washington Arboretum. The Arboretum collection itself also changed during this decade, when the privately funded Japanese Garden was completed in 1960. Also in the 1960s, factional conflicts between private Arboretum supporters created a schism. In 1966 an angry faction of the Arboretum Foundation split off from the group and formed the Friends of the Arboretum, which later became the Northwest Horticulture Society (NHS). The NHS helped establish the UW Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH), a teaching and research center built on the campus shore of Union Bay in 1980.

The most recent administrative change came in the 1980s when the University's Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH) began administering the Arboretum.