The Fallen Trumpet Tree of De Lathmer

Most catalpas stand up. This one lies down. The trumpet tree in the park of De Lathmer has gone horizontal with age, and rather than take a saw to it, the estate left it lying across the grass. What you walk up to is not a trunk with a crown on top of it but a low tangle of limbs at about the height of a person, leaning away in several directions, still in leaf and still flowering every summer. It was planted somewhere between 1850 and 1880, which makes it roughly 150 years old, give or take a decade. Catalpa bignonioides comes from the American southeast and behaves in a Dutch park like a guest who oversleeps: bare well into May when everything around it has leafed out, then white trumpets by the hundred in high summer, flecked yellow and purple in the throat, then long thin seed pods that hang on and rattle through the winter. The address changed around it. De Lathmer was a castle estate; the 42 hectares now belong to a care organisation, the house is closed to visitors and the park is not, so walkers reach the tree freely, and the whole complex has been a listed rijksmonument since 2002. Nobody has recorded a girth. On a tree lying at this angle, measuring one would be its own afternoon's work.