Trees of my Childhood: Catalpa [Part One of a new series]

[muckefuck]

The catalpas are in bloom in Chicago. I meant to say something about this last week, when I noticed the first blossoms. Heck, I've been wishing for a while now that I'd bothered to mention every flowering species I've seen this year as it bloomed, but my head is such cheesecloth that the memory of what I've seen drips out before I get to a computer. Maybe next year, I'll keep a little notebook and do week-by-week updates. Maybe.

I've always looked forward to their tiny white blossoms. They remind me of orchids, plants I'd rarely seen outside of florist shops before I met monshu. An entire tree--and catalpas can grow very tall--covered in minature white orchids. And when there's a windstorm or thunderstorm, then the ground beneath becomes covered in tiny white flowers. (For a while, at least; they wilt quickly and, within a day or so, become ugly brown smears on the sidewalk.)

Dad was less than enchanted with them. He described the catalpa as a tree that "drops shit three times a year." First, the flowers. After these are gone, the long seed pods will begin to grow. They start out the same light green as the leaves, but by August or so, the outside skin will have become brown and woody. When these drop, they're a bitch to clean up. Like twigs, they're too heavy to rake up easily; they just slip between the tines. Finally, in early fall, the huge leaves--as big as a human hand with the fingers spread--turn an ugly yellow and fall. Leave them on the ground, add a little rainful, and they mat to form an effective grass-killing carpet.


Some of the pods remain hanging on the branches well into winter, augmenting the distinctiveness of the tree's leafless silhouette. (They're not well-turned trees, like maples or ashes. Without leaves, they can look a little scraggly despite their size.) For their long, slender shape and dark brown appearance we called them "cigars". One of my mom's treasured memories is a late summer afternoon playing with her cousins, pretending that catalpa pods were cigars and "smoking" them. "Cigar trees" was probably the only name I knew for them until a Boy Scout project that required me to identify two dozen or so local trees. I was able to do it almost without leaving the yard. We had a catalpa in back of the house in Troy which dad always talked about cutting down but never did.

I'm glad he didn't. We I finally read up on them, I discovered that they were generally bottomland trees. (So why did one grow in our yard, atop a small hill? Must've been planted.) They carried a whiff of the stinking swamps with them, which made them seem quite exotic in the middle of town. I felt lucky to have one. It came as a surprise to see so many growing in Chicago; I never thought they could survive this far north.

Comments

[go-wade-in.livejournal.com]

purty pictures!

i didn't realize that Catalpa wasn't just the name of a street.