The Catalpa of Haveselskabets Have

The catalpa is among the last trees in any garden to come into leaf, so for several weeks each spring it stands there looking dead while everything around it is green. Then it produces leaves the size of a hand, white foxglove-shaped flowers in midsummer, and long thin seed pods that hang on through the winter. This one is just inside the entrance of Haveselskabets Have, the Danish Horticultural Society's garden in Frederiksberg, 2.17 metres round and 12 metres tall. It forks about two metres up and continues as a pair of limbs, which is the ordinary way a southern catalpa builds itself: wide rather than high, more umbrella than column. The garden is free and open all year, roughly from six in the morning until somewhere between five and ten at night depending on the season, which makes this one of the easier trees on this list to get to. It is a couple of minutes from Frederiksberg Allé metro. Only the register names the tree. The garden is well documented and this catalpa is not, beyond a survey in September 2023 that measured it and recorded it healthy. Nobody has dated it, and no age is guessed at here.