The Twenty-Fourth Avenue Catalpas

A pair, registered together in 1994, the year Portland's heritage list opened. One is 4.1 metres round and twenty six tall, the other 3.8 and twenty three. Northern catalpa is a tree that does everything conspicuously. The leaves are heart shaped and up to thirty centimetres long, so the crown reads as coarse from a distance. In June it flowers in upright trusses of white bells freckled with purple and yellow inside, thousands at once, and the fallen petals cover the pavement. Then it hangs seed pods like bean pods, forty centimetres or more, which stay on through winter and rattle, and which give the tree its American nickname of cigar tree. Its natural range is small, a patch of the Mississippi basin, and it got everywhere else because railway companies planted it in plantations for fence posts: catalpa wood rots slowly. The fashion collapsed, the trees stayed. Come in the second half of June. There is not much on this site that beats a large catalpa in full flower, and there are two of them here.