The Catalpa of the Cleopatralaan

Every spring this tree gives its street a fright. The southern catalpa is one of the last trees in Europe to come into leaf, often not until the end of May, by which point everything around it has been green for six weeks and it is still a bare grey skeleton hung with last year's beans. Those beans are the other thing. The flowers open in July, white and orchid-shaped, freckled with purple and striped yellow down the throat, in upright clusters that a grown tree carries by the hundred. What follows is a crop of thin brown pods up to forty centimetres long that hang on through the winter and give the species its other name, the Indian bean tree. Nothing else on a Dutch street looks remotely like it. Catalpa bignonioides is a narrow native, from a corner of the American southeast around Georgia and Florida, and it took to European cities largely because it puts up with being boxed in by pavement. This one grows opposite the houses on the Cleopatralaan in Amstelveen. Nobody wrote down when it was planted. The register reasons that the neighbourhood went up in the 1960s and the tree probably dates from the same work, which places it somewhere in the 1950s or 1960s, and that reasoning is the whole of the evidence. If you know better, tell us.