Southern Catalpa: Catalpa bignonioides
Recently I wrote of one of our white blooming trees, the beautiful Southern Magnolia, just starting to come out in full flower all over Greensboro this the last week of May. Today I would like to mention another less common but equally beautiful and certainly more showy white flowered tree blooming right now in town, the Southern Catalpa, the latter being an Indian name. You’ve seen them driving around – a fairly small tree with large heart shaped leaves, and large clusters of flowers maybe six to eight inches apart, pointed upward as if just for show, and if you have time to notice driving by, hanging seed pods that look like long skinny cigars.
The flowers of the Southern Catapla are almost odorless, so they offer no rewards there, but they are exquisitely beautiful. Each large cluster of flowers is made of twenty some-odd orchid looking flowers of an inch or so apart. They petals are mostly a creamy white, but laced with purple dots entering the inner cup of the flower, along with yellow orange stripes inviting insects into the inner sanctum of the flower where the pollen carrying stamens are to be found hanging overhead.
The leaves of the Southern Catalpa are huge and heart shaped. On one prominent Catalpa near my office the leaves were a foot long and almost as wide.
The Catalpa may reach heights of forty to fifty feet but most around here are smaller. There is one in a backyard of a house near East Bessemer and Maple which backs up to a dentist office which must be pushing sixty feet and whose truck is three to three and a half feet in diameter. It is a beautiful tree, worth a drive by.
But the record Southern Catalpa reported in our Guilford County Treasure Tree Program is an 80 feet tall four feet in diameter behemoth on South Aycock Street with a fifty foot spread! It’s hard to believe a Catalpa that tall is not actually its cousin, the Northern Catalpa, but even if so, it will be beautiful just the same.
The Catalpa is a fast growing but rather ungainly little tree, kind of scraggly until it gets to a certain height. No two grow the same, so each is interesting in its own way. And as I have said, the flowers are beautiful.
I wanted you to see the beauty of the Catalpa flowers I did a search just now on the internet and found a couple of links with decent pictures. See for yourself what a grand flower this is, and see if you can notice some as you driver around Greensboro in late May or early June.
Try these links for pictures:
|
