The Green Island Catalpa

For a couple of weeks in June this is the loudest thing on the island, hung with upright clusters of white flowers, each one frilled at the lip and spotted yellow and purple down the throat. For the rest of the year it carries beans. Northern catalpa fruits in slim pods up to half a metre long that stay on the tree all winter and rattle in the wind off the falls. The island is Green Island, a scrap of land in the Rideau River at the waterfall, reached on foot over the Minto Bridges. The register that lists this tree dates those bridges to 1900 and names them for Lord Minto, then governor general; other accounts put the building at 1900 to 1902, and the two have never been reconciled. The catalpa grows near the federal building that served as Ottawa's city hall from 1958, when Princess Margaret opened it, until amalgamation on the first day of 2001. The rest of the island belongs to the dead: the Ottawa Memorial, the Mackenzie-Papineau Monument, the National Artillery Monument, and a sculpture of John McCrae put up in 2015. The tree has no date at all. The register dates the bridge and the building beside it and says nothing about the catalpa, and borrowing either number would be inventing an age. If you know one, tell us.