The Catalpa of Haveselskabets Have

In late spring, when the rest of the garden has been green for a month, this tree still looks dead. Catalpas come into leaf later than almost anything else grown in northern Europe, and then make up for the delay with leaves the size of a dinner plate, heart-shaped and soft. Somebody arriving in May and somebody arriving in July are looking at two different objects. The southern catalpa comes from the river bottoms of the American southeast, a long way from Frederiksberg. This one has the easiest address of any tree on this list: just inside the entrance of Haveselskabets Have, the Danish Horticultural Society's garden, which makes it the first tree you meet. The register surveyed it in 2023 and recorded 2.17 metres of girth and 12 metres of height, with the trunk forking into the crown about two metres up and one clean stem below the fork. Healthy. Nobody has put a date on it, and if the society's own records hold a planting year, we would like to see it. In July it flowers, white with a yellow and purple throat, and then hangs the long thin seed pods that earned the species its other name, the Indian bean tree. The pods stay on all winter after the leaves have gone, which is the one season you can name the tree from across the lawn.